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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2926 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 13, 2025

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Has anyone used Temu, the online marketplace that makes Amazon seem like a reputable establishment?
I'm in the middle of writing a post about it, but would be interested to hear other people's impressions, especially anyone who's familiar with China and Chinese business practices.

I think it's time to pay attention to it because every Chinese importer has started to copy their sales tactics: fake lotteries in popups to hand out coupons, fake rewards deals where "you are surely Premium customer, only 1% away from earning free item saar!", high pressure "deals" like "you only have 45 seconds to buy 10 items from this list to earn free $999!!! (in coupons that require you to buy even more shit)", etc.

Bought stuff from Temu for about $10. Threw everything instantly away. It's cheap, low-quality crap from the same sellers as on Aliexpress.

Looking at the website now, the minimum order price is set to $25, which is ridiculous. This wasn't the case a year ago. According to reddit, this minimum order price is unique to each user. Interesting.

The checkout process is surprisingly smooth and the shipping really fast.

This might die down. The English-speaking web was like this in 2000, it didn’t get ‘clean’ until it was taken over by big brands with a need to protect their reputation.

I've bought quite a bit of bike shit off AliExpress. Decent deals to be had if you lurk enthusiast forums.

How do the deals work? I've looked at stuff on AliExpress without taking the leap and a lot of it boasts huge discounts but it gives the impression that those are only to get you through the door for your first purchase and the undiscounted prices are, while better than the eBay resellers, not that amazing.

Ironically it's put me off signing up because I don't want to waste the new customer discount on buying a couple of TPU inner tubes if I might want to buy a much more expensive item later.

undiscounted prices are, while better than the eBay resellers, not that amazing.

Honestly, this is mostly the level I operate on (and sometimes big sales days like 11.11). This and generally knowing what's a good product (TPU tubes are a great example, Kalloy Uno stems, Raudax jerseys, and the 3d printed saddles are also well-regarded and in my experience pretty good value; complete bikes and wheelsets are better bought from OEMs that sell via email, for example).

I think the app offers some better deals but I haven't bothered to engage with it very much.

Yeah, I've gotten some stuff off Temu. The app is hilariously gamified and scammy but the stuff I ordered did arrive and was as described. The quality is about what you would expect, which is to say "adequate for single-use items".

I got some 2.5kwh DC House batteries at half off vs amazon, which are actually a reputable brand. There's a small amount of "quality" stuff floating in the chineseium garbage patch, but a lot of it ranges from "mislabed" to "dangerous" to "literally just a printed picture of the item"

As a knitter, my new favorite example of Temu-style trash is the fake sweater, where someone used AI to generate a very complex cabled sweater design, and then printed that design onto a t-shirt.

That's amazing. There's also a bizarre amount of AI porn printed on metal plates(?) with names like "antique vintage something or other." So I wonder if half of this stuff isn't just AI slapping random stuff scraped from social media on products with associated tags.

T-shirts were the first thing they automated that with, like when you go "I want this on a t-shirt!" on Twitter and 5 bots immediately scrape the pic and post a store link.

"I want this on a t-shirt!"

Then people started trolling with images from Disney, Nintendo and worse https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-want-this-on-a-shirt-bot-bait

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