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Originally Posted On: https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-temu-legit-what-to-know-about-this-wildly-popular-shopping-app/
E-commerce is a staple of our economy. In 2021, e-commerce accounted for 21% of global retail sales. From e-commerce giants such as Amazon to obscure and sometimes sketchy t-shirt ads on Instagram, digital shopping is a cornerstone of online activity.
The newest digital superstore taking the internet by storm is a Chinese-owned digital marketplace called Temu. It’s the number one free shopping app in the App Store, beating out Shein, Amazon, and Walmart. Image: Jada Jones/ZDNET
What is Temu?
Temu is an online-shopping megastore that offers just about any product you can think of. You can buy car accessories, clothing, small home appliances, outdoor furniture, power tools, baby clothes, and everything in between.
Temu is based in Boston, but its parent company’s principal office is in Ireland.
The most stand-out feature about Temu is that many of the site’s products are incredibly cheap. You can buy sunglasses for $2, necklaces for $1, and glow-in-the-dark pet collars for $3. In fact, whatever you can think of is probably on Temu for less than $10.
Temu is a globalized version of Pinduoduo, a Chinese e-commerce company. Like Shein, AliExpress, and Wish, Temu advertises products for a low price and can do so because of lower manufacturing costs in China.
But AliExpress and Wish never caught on with American audiences, mainly because the product listings were often fake, and even if they were real, the products were often cheaply made, and arrived significantly later than expected.
Temu launched in late 2022 and quickly rose to the top spot in the App Store and Play Store’s shopping categories. People found out about Temu from ads and were attracted to the site’s low prices. According to Meta’s Ad Library, Temu has run about 3,400 Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger ads since November 19, 2022.
According to MIT Technology Review, similar apps, such as Shein and AliExpress, only promote dozens of ads once.
Is Temu a legitimate website?
It depends on your definition of “legitimate”. Yes, most of the products on Temu are real, and you will receive them, but it could be weeks before they reach your doorstep, and they might look slightly different than they did on the website or be lower quality than you expected.
Are the products on Temu good quality?
On TrustPilot Reviews, Temu has 1,199 reviews and an average of three stars. However, one-star reviews have a slight majority over any other amount of stars. Most people complain about long shipping times, low-quality items, and poor customer service.
However, there are plenty of five-star reviews for Temu on TrustPilot, mostly raving about low prices and a large selection of items. It’s unclear how many of those rave reviews are authentic or verifiable.
Temu is not accredited by Better Business Bureau (BBB) and has an average rating of two out of five stars. Many recent complaints about Temu on the BBB website say that items never arrived or, if they did, took weeks or even months to arrive.
Who owns Temu?
Temu’s parent company is PDD Holdings, a multinational commerce group headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. PDD Holdings owns Temu and its sister company, Pinduoduo.
How is everything on Temu so cheap?
The items on Temu are exceptionally cheap. Like another Chinese e-commerce company, Shein, Temu keeps its things affordable by connecting customers directly to suppliers, and Temu handles the shipping of items to customers.
Temu’s parent company, PDD Holdings, has built an impressive network of cost-efficient global suppliers, opening the opportunity to access millions of products. Temu also follows a reverse-manufacturing business model that removes the middle layer of product distribution, eliminating the cost of go-betweens.
On top of the business model, Temu can relay customer feedback directly to manufacturers, alerting them to the products consumers want and when to produce the desired item. With these factors wrapped into Temu’s business model, the company can keep prices astonishingly low.
Does Temu produce its products ethically?
You can think of Temu like Amazon: a large e-marketplace with items that belong to every category. So Temu’s goal isn’t to stay on top of style trends that lead to millions of garments ending up in landfills, which might happen with Shein and other fast fashion brands.
According to Retail Insider, Temu’s reverse-manufacturing model helps the company decrease waste by more accurately gauging customers’ desired products. But according to many online reviews, many products bought from Temu are poorly made, unusable, or break easily, increasing the likelihood of Temu products ending up in landfills.
Temu’s Third Party Code of Conduct stresses that the company has a zero-tolerance policy for vendors that use forced labor to manufacture their products. All Temu vendors must comply with local wage and hour laws, and their working conditions must be safe and non-abusive.
If you’re wondering if Temu is environmentally ethical, that’s a trickier topic. Sites like Temu, Shein, and AliExpress say they’re committed to environmental sustainability by digitalizing the economy, cutting supply chain waste, and offsetting carbon emissions.
But many of these companies also distribute products that contain harmful chemicals that eventually end up in landfills.
Is Temu a good company to buy from?
Online shopping can be a gamble. Fake reviews are littered across American retailers, such as Amazon and Walmart, which damage consumers’ trust in online stores.
Packages can be lost in transit, stolen from your doorstep, broken during the shipping process, or your item can show up looking completely different than it did online.
Temu’s standard shipping policy in the US is free, but your items aren’t expected to ship for seven to 15 business days. Temu says that if your package never arrives, or you’re told it’s been delivered but hasn’t been, you should contact customer service within 90 days of purchase.
