A couple of months ago I began seeing advertisements for a new website named Temu. Seemingly overnight I went from never hearing of Temu to seeing 20 Temu ads or more a day on Facebook and Instagram among other websites. You may have seen those ads too and wondered if Temu is a legitimate company. I decided to take a chance and find out.
Temu is similar in structure to another retailer you may (or may not) have heard of, AliExpress. Temu is a Chinese-owned company that is registered in the Cayman Islands, has a physical headquarters in Boston, and sells goods directly from China. This business model allows them to sell Chinese made items at a steep discount.
Temu was founded in the summer of 2022 and has already had several security-related issues. Apple removed the Temu app after the company was caught capturing a little too much data from its users’ phones. (Temu altered the app and was allowed back on). Temu’s Chinese app, Pinduoduo, was removed from the Google app store for containing malware. Basically, Temu has been caught doing all the things Americans were afraid TikTok might be doing. In its first year of business, some Temu customers have complained that the items they’ve ordered have arrived broken, late, or not at all.
If you’re wondering why anyone would order anything from Temu, it’s because everything is cheap. Some of the things they sell are merely cheap while other things are super-duper cheap. It’s fair to say that there’s a difference between inexpensive items and cheap items, and Temu sells things from both categories.
The promise of cheap items is what lured me to to the site. A couple of weeks ago I was searching for a couple of USB adapters and accidentally typed my request into Google instead of Amazon. Specifically what I was looking for was a small USB-C to USB-A adapter. The first two hits Google returned was one adapter from Amazon for $6.99, and a pack of two adapters from Temu for 99 cents. Based on that price difference, I decided to click on the link to Temu. In an attempt to build their business Temu is currently offering free shipping on all orders. With tax, my order came to $1.12.
During the checkout process, Temu informed me that “80% of all orders arrive within 10 days!” Although Temu’s interface looks similar to Amazon’s, keep in mind that all of those cheap items are shipping directly from China, and as you probably remember from geography class, there’s a lot of water between here and there. To soften the blow, Temu informed me that if my order took longer than 10 days to arrive, I would receive a $5 Temu gift card. The potential to make $4 on this transaction was too good to pass up. I should note that faster delivery was available, for a fee. For $13 I could upgrade to express delivery, guaranteeing me delivery within 7 days.
I placed my order on October 1st, and my adapters arrived on October 10. (No $5 gift card for me, drat!) Over the past nine days, here are the emails I received from Temu:
Those are the ones that made it through to my inbox. Here are the ones that ended up in my spam folder:
That’s… a lot, right?
Yesterday, the adapters arrived as promised. (I received emails informing me that my package was out for delivery, that it was about to be delivered, that it had been delivered, and that I should leave a review.) The adapters work as expected.
Would I buy an expensive computer or laptop from Temu? No. But would I buy something like an external hard drive from them? Also, no. What I would buy, on the other hand, are clothes, and decorations, and small electronics I was not in a hurry for. Temu won’t become my primary shopping site, but it’ll be one I continue to check for deals — speaking of which, I just found their Halloween section, and I’ll let you know how that order goes in another 10 days!
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