What kind of experiences have you had with the site? Are they reliable? Do you get what you expect at a reasonable price in a reasonable time period?
I’ve never used it, but I have heard varying things about it. It does look to me like a dumping ground for things that aren’t quite poor-quality enough to simply discard.
Well, I literally made my first order a few hours ago, so I’ll let you know. I bought $13 worth of stuff, including rubber bands, a nose trimmer (I have low hopes for this one), pot brushes, and a simple iPhone 12 cover (I’m also not expecting much from this.) I can waste a few dollars here and there to see how good or bad these products are.
It’s very much a get what you pay for thing but that’s not necessarily bad. I’ve mainly bought household type things with one major exception and been overall happy. Note that side things may be smaller than their picture suggest. One notable example was a metal pen with ruler markings on the body. I owned one before that died so this replaced it and is an inch shorter. Besides that, I’m remembering buying an oven mitt with silicone pads that I like a lot, some kitchen scrubby sponges which are fine (not great but good to have a supply for the price), an LED flashlight which is quite impressive for the $4 I paid, a car wiper refresher that surprisingly worked, some paracord which is indeed paracord, a wire saw which is nothing amazing but works for what I wanted and some little wire pipe cleaner things. The single largest item was a $45 micro ATX sized PC case which was pretty cool with the realistic expectations of a $45 Temu PC case.
I have not bought any clothing or electronic items from them. I’d need to hear some glowing reviews before assuming some set of earbuds or retro-handheld game thing was worth the money. Household bric-a-brac I’m more willing to take a chance on.
I’m an old hat at ordering from AliExpress but definitely preferred the much faster shipping with Temu. Be aware that they will spam your email relentlessly unless you set your notifications. I left it on thinking i might get some coupons but instead it’s 4-6 trash mails daily. Also, I did my shipping via their website as I don’t trust then enough to install a mobile app. That’s just me, though.
The Lil 'Wrekker has had pretty good success ordering fashion stuff. The makeup is crap, she says.
I don’t think she’s ordered any tech stuff.
They’re really popular with young adults. Who are a disposable type people, in general. YMMV
I think they’re probably ok if you don’t expect too much.
I’ve been curious about Temu too, given their ad blitz on YT and the like. Haven’t visited it, tho.
Is it like the Dollar Store, but online?
It feels more like shopping at Ali Baba, maybe? Or a down-market Ali Baba? I’ve never actually ordered from them, either, but I get those vibes. Almost like it may even be a reseller for them or something. But, yes, there is an aspect of dollar store to them, but they also have more normally priced items. Like their clothes aren’t really much cheaper than I could get at a discount retailer during a sale. Or I could just hit the thrift store and save serious money.
That’s exactly the attitude I’m going into this with. If you don’t mind dollar store shopping (and I certainly don’t) then you probably have expectations properly calibrated.
It is another Wish dot com sort of seller. I think they order from Alibaba and split up the shipments.
Clothing - they have these chenille microfiber hoodies/buttonfront cardigans - they run small, a 3x is a 1x so I buy 5x to get 3x, but for $10 each, I didn’t bother sending the one that was too small back. I got brown, pale green, burgundy. They wash just fine. The cat pouch sweatshirt [to kangaroo pouch the cat in] was ordered at 5x but came in 1x. So I would say that you really need to order HUGE to get normal.
Cookware - bought a set of toaster oven bakeware [muffin placque, shallow tray with wire rack and small rectangular cake pan] and it was as expected, a set of tiny cooking utensils [sort of ladle, couple spatulas, whisk] as expected
little soot sprites and little white glow in the dark ghost people like 99 cents a package for 20 soot sprites and 12 ghosts
Though politically, it is getting to the point where i am hesitant to buy chinese goods.
You folks will get a hoot out of this - mrAru is working for a fuel cell company in Rochester, and as such he inspects incoming parts, many are made of copper and made in China [and of deplorable quality, they run anywhere from 4 percent fubar to 10 percent fubar] He jokes that Ea-Nasir must have moved to China and reproduced a long line of crappy copper merchants =)
I did a quick check for one of the most common scams in computer components: huge storage for little money. (The devices are rigged to report more space than they actually have.)
Yep, they have those.
But so do Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc.
I orderd some newsboy caps from them a few months ago and was quite happy with those. I also bought an inspection camera that wasn’t bad but nothing special either. They seem to be fine for cheap items that you aren’t expecting much out of and I wouldn’t order anything that i might depend on holding up. Like others have said it’s “you get what you pay for”.
Alibaba is a big bulk seller. You go to them for 2,000 pencil cases with your name on them at 17¢ a case. Ordering from them often involves extra forms since you’re having manufacturing runs made for you.
AliExpress is sort of the retail side of Alibaba in that you can order individual stuff with a lot of weird things to be found. Much of it is unsurprisingly trash but there’s some decent stuff and, of course, much of what you’d buy at Walmart or Target comes out of the same factories. On the tech side, there’s some interesting finds that support non-Western markets like refurbished motherboards with a soldered on CPU that’s fairly recent. Of course, there’s also a billion SSD and GPU scams as well. Side note: My wife once had me buy her some shoes from AliExpress and I was expecting disaster but she happily wore them for years. The only other garment I’ve bought from them was a cool Sonic hat for my kid.
Wish is basically AliExpress for cowards 
It’s the same stuff as AliExpress but with a more Western-friendly veneer so people don’t feel as much like they’re shopping direct from Shenzhen.
Temu is pretty much the same except they seem to ship much quicker than I ever got from AliExpress and offers automatic $5 credits for late deliveries. They’re also better about price adjustments for sales and returns. AliExpress is sort of a marketplace where, if you order six items, they each have their own shipping date and delivery time whereas Temu puts that all under one fairly consumer friendly umbrella.
Temu has much less interesting tech stuff the last time I looked. Sure, they have all the flash memory scams but little in way of PC components, much less weird components.
Looking over my orders, I’ve gotten 35 items from them, probably been satisfied with 30, so-so about five (as in, not total fails but a real lesson in getting what you paid for) and no complete disappointments. Of course, I set my expectations accordingly.
I ordered a novelty T-shirt for $8 to test them out. It arrived in less than 2 weeks, was the size I requested (XL), and the quality was the same as any tourist shop T-shirt found anywhere.
The only downside, as mentioned earlier, is the relentless e-mails I now get from them.
Not that anyone cares, but I need to amend my record: I got a roll of window screen repair tape that is trash. The page made it look like an adhesive mesh to put over holes in a screen but the product is more like packing tape with a mesh pattern on it. It looks like you slapped packing tape onto your screen up until it falls off three minutes later.
My wife has made several orders from there. It’s all low-quality off-brand stuff, like you’d get from a sketchy discount retailer. The site itself is legit enough, they’re not scamming you any more than Amazon or any other online site that offers cheap doodads is.
One thing that did bother me is Temu incorporates a lot of addictive dark-pattern junk into their mobile app, stuff like slot machine mechanics that are clearly scripted into getting you to invite friends and spread the word in exchange for bigger discounts. It’s bad enough that they’re selling cheap junk, adding in that predatory manipulation is way worse.
My cousin has been talking about how she was trying Temu out of curiosity. She placed an order for $20 worth of cheap stuff as a test and it arrived over the past couple of days, and she is satisfied with it. (They at least sent what she ordered and not a toy school bus.) I’ve also started getting ads for Temu on Facebook, which brought to my attention that I have been blisfully ignorant of my lacking in the glow-in-the-dark kodama department, so I had her put a set of 10 in her next order. (Amazon charges around $8 for 5 of them.)
I’d add that between AliExpress, TEMU, and the other one whose name escapes me at the moment, when your significant other sends you a link to some product they saw on Facebook, you can pretty well always get it cheaper on one of the other three. (OK, that’s not much of a sentence but you get my point.) It may still be junk, but it won’t be as overpriced.
I’ve been wondering about this place, too. I’ve been seeing ads for them for months, and half the time I can’t even figure out what the things in the ad are.
I’ve been inundated by ads for them, also. I’ll reserve judgment. Looks kinda like Alibaba’s low rent cousin!
I was looking for a link to Vibram Five Fingers shoes the other day, for another Dope thread, and the first hit was a Temu knockoff. 13 bucks versus 85, or some such.
I just ordered 3 metal cutting dies for paper crafting. I know the quality will be around a C minus based on the reviews.
I’ve started to see Temu ads popping up on my phone while surfing FB and Words With Friends. I’ve been assuming that they (the ads) were just going to throw out some malware-esque teasers that would force me to cycle my phone off and on to get rid of it.
I’m glad that’s not the case, but I’m not finding myself inclined to do any shopping with them.