When I want something cheap, I usually hit Aliexpress (website). As I was looking at the Aliexpress app page on the Google Play Store to check its privacy details, TEMU came up as a recommended app.
Now, my wife has used TEMU in the past, but since she often can’t find her way around things, I downplayed her negative experience as “user error”. That said, I went to the TEMU website and started looking around.
I found something that was a reasonable price, but then get this message saying I could get this item free through the app… sigh. OK. I sign up with my usual fake/random credentials and add this “free” item to my cart.
A spinning prize wheel comes up. Hey, I can get THREE free items now! Sweet. I spend the next 3 hours looking for stuff I can actually use, doom-scrolling through everything from women’s underwear to t-shirts with assault rifle print. Literally something for everyone. LOL
Then I select my third “free” item, and another spinning prize wheel comes up. “100% off the next $35”. Ok.
I didn’t need more stuff, but hey, 100% off sounds like more free stuff!
I spend another hour looking, keeping an eye on the amount “saved” (apparently $600+, for stuff that is sold on Aliexpress for maybe $25).
When I finally get to check out, I get another spinning prize wheel. “100% off $100”!! Goddamn, I’m on a roll here. How do these guys make any money?!!
More time looking… I must have spent well over 4 hours on their app. Time to check out.
$67? Huh? What about 100% off and all that nonsense? Enter your phone number*
- You must agree to get promotional texts, or you can’t check out… hmm, maybe my wife wasn’t wrong.
In any case, there was no way to actually get anything “free”. I deleted the app, deleted my account, and will never touch this scam ever again.
Do people actually end up getting anything from Temu? I thought AliExpress was bad, but the experience is 1000x better.
TEMU is pretty widely talked about as being a scam. Sorry you weren’t in the know.
Why the hell is it so popular??? I don’t get it. Do people like these never-ending promotional games without actually being able to buy something easily?
Temu uses illegal marketing tactics. The illegal marketing tactic they used on you was the Bait and Switch. These tactics are illegal because they are effective. Many people with weaker wills would just say “fuck it” and check out anyway, rather than deleting the app. These people prop up Temu and give them the funds to continue running their illegal business the way they do.
I’m just wondering why the FTC hasn’t fined the app out of operating in the US yet
Yeah, that pretty much explains it. Sad state of affairs when you have too many people willing to support such an unethical business model. I can imagine that anyone with a gambling addition could spend thousands of dollars quite easily on their platform.
Marketing. It popped up for you and has marketing taglines suggesting it’s substantially cheaper than other options. Some people are willing to jump through a lot of hoops for the possibility of savings
Some people are willing to jump through a lot of hoops for the possibility of savings
Sounds like a lottery! Even jumping through hoops resulted in no sale for them, and no product for me. Such a stupid concept for a “store”.
I don’t ever spin the wheel. I just go there to buy cheap stuff I don’t need to be the highest quality. Never buy anything like a digital camera, but you can buy plastic brushes to clean your wheels all day long. Stuff like that. But yeah, it IS pretty scammy.
I don’t ever spin the wheel.
In this case, I was forced to spin in order to get this item “free”. I mean, it was the whole point I downloaded the app! But they keep giving you more and more spinning wheels, and at some point you have to decide to check out. Then you’re hit with a much larger total than they led you on to believe you would have!
Yup, I understand the comment. I was merely pointing out that I don’t think TEMU is 100% scam. It has its uses. To be honest, when I saw the wheel, I just thought it was an annoying pop up and never really considered taking it seriously. LOL. Just clicked on that x.
From what I have come to understand (from Lemmy), they make their real money off of your data, and are a privacy nightmare. I actually was ordering from them regularly until I learned that.
I was prepared for this, despite seeing all their banners saying how private they are. All the details I gave them were disposable, and had they let me actually order these items, I would have likely used some kind of disposable credit card to process the payment.
But it’s so bizarre, like they keep throwing one promotion after another, and none actually materialize.
I’d been using AliExpress for quite a while before hearing about Temu. Went to go check it out and it’s like an exact clone of AE (including the discount popups) but then it forces you to install an app in order to buy anything so I noped out. Not sure why anyone would use them when you can get the same shit off AE without all the hoops.
There is some differentiation in terms of product selection
It’s not literally a scam, in that I’ve ordered things and they’ve arrived (in a timely fashion, actually), but the “free” stuff is pretty close to being one. The free credits or whatever are so over the top as to be eye rolling, so while they probably are officially a scam, I just couldn’t get too worked up.
Overall, it’s basically a tiny bit cheaper than AE, a tiny bit faster, but with more limited selection and they make the annoying gamification on AE look like the height of restraint and class. I found my personal line for trading time and tracking for cheap prices, and it’s between AE and Temu.
One tangential weird thing is that I’ve seen Shein, the fast fashion brand, has gone full “marketplace” and is now selling a lot of Temu like stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with clothes.
(in a timely fashion, actually),
I bought two things. One of them had a message saying “Guaranteed by (X date) or you get a $5 credit.” Obviously that was the one item that showed up late. Sure enough, I get a $5 credit, followed by a bunch of emails on how I can get five or ten times the value out of my $5 credit.
Temu is a scam and like most cheap junk sites they often use slave labor and lots of unethical practices. (Same with Ali express)
Also this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/shopping-app-temu-is-dangerous-malware-spying-on-your-texts-lawsuit-claims/ (the app is actual malware)
Honestly Temu is probably going to be banned. (And that’s a ban I would absolutely support)
I want to day you could probably lump Shein with those as well but I have nothing to back that up except it has the same scammy feel.
Man, the moment I saw the spinning wheel I noped out. I’ve seen that shit on pirating websites less than I’ve seen on Temu.
LOL. Yeah, it gave me one those “I guess a link to download a virus comes next” vibe! haha
shakes fists back in my day we used dx.com and AliExpress.com. The hell is this temu shit?
Side note: seems dealextreme/dx is dead now
Giving me a hell of a nostalgia trip with that dx though. I remember really, really wanting to buy these little keychains that had live bamboo in them from that site.
Do people actually end up getting anything from Temu?
My colleagues were just talking about it and they were saying they’re getting packages almost daily… Meanwhile their local economy is shit.
I’m a carrier for the US Postal Service. Yes, people actually buy stuff off of Temu. You can always tell it’s from Temu because it looks like a ball of tape. Large ball, small ball…doesn’t matter…it’s Temu.
As someone who has “won” the games (that aren’t actually games) and claimed the prizes a bunch of times, I’d advise you just ignore them. The fish/farm/etc games, and the popups that claim free items, anything else. Close them, and just buy whatever you were going to buy. Unless you have a lot, I mean a LOT of people that are willing to sign up for temu as a first time user, using you as the referral, the only way to complete those so-called games is to spend around $800+ to earn your way to conspiring the game and claiming the free prizes. Prizes that if you pay attention, you could simply bought outright for somewhere in the range of $5-20.
And the stuff with the spinning wheels and whatnot, claiming this or that percentage discount, you’ll get a cheap item for free(something that you could have bought for $3-4 max), but only by adding it to an order with a predetermined number of other items, which have had their prices dynamically increased, and will actually cost you more than if you had simply purchased all of the same items but by searching them up and just adding them to your cart normally. If you add some items to your wishlist, you’ll start to see those items being offered to you in these supposed deals and discounts. You will also notice that if that item was $5 when you added it to your wishlist, the “deal” page might be showing it to you with a crossed out $50 price, and a new amazing discount price of let’s say $9(I call this the J. C. Penny method). I tend to keep a large wishlist, with items that sit there for months while I decide if I’ll get around to buying them or not, so this kind of fuckery with the prices sticks out to me a lot.
This all exactly the same for when they had the cash back deal. Place an order, and they credit your account with, well credit, that you can spend on more stuff. The more you spend in the order, the higher the percentage of cash back. But as before, the prices of the items you buy to earn that cash back are getting fucked around with dynamically, and increased as you shop. Not only that, but they change the way that you received the cash back. It used to be that after the order shipped, you go to a certain page and cash out your earned credit, and it is then available for use. Then they started placing limits on how much you could cash out per day. And then the last time I had used it, you instead only got a few cents per day, and you had to keep opening the app every single day and manually claiming those few cents. And if you forgot one day, you just lose that credit entirely.
Ask of this is to say, I absolutely promise anyone reading this, the games, deals, discounts, or whatever else they are promising you on temu, are absolutely, in no uncertain terms, not worth your time (even if you believe your time to hold no value), and will cost you more money than if you had simply purchased the items normally through just searching for what you want and adding it to your cart. Back when temu was still pissing away ass-loads of money to get people onto their platform, you could legitimately get free and/or heavily discounted items, as well as decent amount of cash back/credit. But that’s is no longer the case. They got the massive number of users they wanted, now they are looking to actually make money from them.
The only reason I but anything on temu at all, where I would have bought it on AliExpress previously, is that temu will usually get the items to me between 1 and 2 weeks, while AE still often takes several weeks before the seller even THINKS about shipping the order, and then often an additional 3-4 weeks minimum for it to actually arrive. I had some stuff that I needed a bunch of, and they only had a few in stock on temu. So I ordered them all, then ordered more on AE right after. The temu ones came in 6 days. The AE ones took 2 and a half months. And before anyone asks, the identical item on Amazon was more than triple the price. Most of this stuff tends to be.
I ordered maybe 300+ items on AliExpress in 8 years. I will never touch temu, never.
Yeah, I used to buy stuff from ebay, but the free shipping, good selection, and relatively good quality/value items from Ali is hard to beat. Their shipping turnaround times have also gone from weeks/months to 4-6 days. They’re going to be better than Amazon if they keep it up!
But now that I have the temu experience, I’ll never touch their platform again.
I actually don’t mind AliExpress, but it’s just another one of those things where you’ve got to be careful about what you’re buying. Is it some miraculous thing for a dirt cheap price lower than any other place you’ve ever seen? Does the thing do things that no other thing has ever done? Is it in any way too good to be true? Then it almost definitely is. However I have been able to “skip the middle man” on some items that I found for sale in the US and gotten a fairly decent price cut, I just had to wait 2-3 weeks for it to show up.
I actually don’t mind AliExpress, but it’s just another one of those things where you’ve got to be careful about what you’re buying.
100% agree. I’ve had good luck with stuff like RC car parts, e-scooter disc brake pads, various small tools, and cycling clothing/accessories.
I wouldn’t use them for electronics, other than brand name flashlights, but generally speaking I find the stuff there to be pretty good. At least at the quality you’d find on Amazon, but for 1/5th of the price. LOL
I have ordered from TEMU. Yes, getting their free stuff sends you into a black hole. You have to wait a few weeks for most items to show up. It saves a few bucks. Gotta watch the clothing fabric, lots is “shiny polyester”. It’s great for cheap seasonal decorations. Used to be free shipping on a $10 order. Now it’s $15 I think. My partner has figured out you can return at least one item per order for free (and still keep the item) so if you play it right, order a small quantity every day and when you receive it, see what you can return. When you order, it will keep the shopping cart “open” for hours, so if you come back it just adds to the initial order. That’s why I said order a few things once a day. It take like 8 hours to close out the order window.
Damn, sounds like way too much work! LOL
Had I been asked to pay for shipping or something, I would have been cool with it for these “free” items. But my god, it’s like they didn’t want me to actually close out the order without paying way more than zero for it.
I use temu for clothes and some bike stuff. Totally don’t expect quality. Bought some amber lights, dont work.
I bought a bunch of bike stuff from Ali recently, including short-sleeved jerseys. Really inexpensive stuff, but surprisingly good quality. Got some other bike stuff, which saved a ton of money vs. getting them from Amazon.
I honestly would have expected the same quality from TEMU, but the experience is so, so much worse. Any money I might have saved would have been lost trying to navigate around their scummy runarounds!
It’s hard to understand how a company can become so successful doing things like that.
They aren’t successful, they are flopping. Losing 30 bucks an order.
Anecdotally my boss at work bought some stuff from there with her debit card and had her account hacked, fraudulent charges etc. Another friend has bought things from there with a throwaway card and likes it lot. Caveat emptor.
I bought some cable organizers, power strip wall mounts etc. there. Generally does what it’s meant to and sometimes cheaper than what are clearly the same products on ebay. Did not install an app. I’m willing to overlook some shadiness if the end result is I get things I need for less money.
I’ve ordered some household items (door stoppers, tools etc.). The prices were somewhat cheaper than AE, the quality was fine (some things were better than expected. Some very cheap items were… Let’s say they were priced according to their quality. Thought other very cheap items turned out good, so it’s a gamble) and shipping was OK. Never tried the app for privacy reasons, but the site seems ok-ish (it’s a bit janky, but I suspect it’s due in part to some privacy addon I use. In short:
- Don’t use the app.
- Don’t buy very cheap stuff unless you’re willing to chance it.
- The “prizes” either appear only in the app or can be disabled via ad blockers and/or privacy addons.
I only tried the app because the website said that the item I wanted would be “free” through the app. Scummy way to get me to install the app, since I didn’t end up with any “free” items.
I’ll just stick with Aliexpress. I’ve been getting stuff within a week, and it doesn’t feel like I’m in a casino every time I visit. LOL
