In general, I enjoy shopping. I know that’s an odd trait for a straight male, but it’s just how I am. It may or may not stem from how often my mother took me shopping when I was young. But regardless of the reason, I like to think my enjoyment of shopping has trained me to shop smarter and not harder.
Having established that context, let’s talk about Temu. And let’s try to talk seriously.
Because if you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time for the past year, you’ve probably seen ads for Temu. They’re usually very targeted and they stand out in particular ways. You’ll often see products you’ve never seen at a store and at prices that seem too low to be real. Some look like brand name products. Others look like something somebody assembled in their garage.
Whatever the product, the ads are so ubiquitous that they’re almost impossible to avoid. And during the holiday season, you probably saw even more of them. Hopefully, you didn’t just click, sign up, and buy without thinking. If you did, then you might already know why I’m making this.
For background, Temu is a relatively new ecommerce site that launched in late 2022. It’s similar to Amazon in that it sells a wide range of products, but unlike Amazon the site and the interface are a lot more gamified. It has all these widgets and gimmicks that resemble an online casino. And using these features earn you special tokens that you can use to buy products on Temu. But in general, you’ll be buying things the same way you buy them at other sites.
However, as low as the prices seem and as great as the deals appear to be, there are a lot of red flags surrounding this site and the Chinese company that runs it. If you need a comprehensive breakdown of all of them, Snopes did an in-depth investigation on the many issues surrounding it. I highly recommend reading and re-reading this piece before you even visit the site.
In general, Temu is a site that offers tons of cheap stuff, but a lot of that stuff is cheap because it’s a rip-off, a knock-off, or low in overall quality. And what you see on the site isn’t necessarily what you end up receiving. And what you receive is rarely a product that will last. That’s an important detail because Temu’s return and refund policies aren’t nearly as forgiving as most.
Basically, if the product breaks within 90 days of purchasing (and that counts how long it took to ship), you’re out of luck.
That, alone, should give you pause before shopping at Temu. Cheap or not, you won’t get much value out of anything there if it breaks within a few months of purchase. However, there’s one another important detail to consider. It has to do with the potential malware and spyware included with the app.
It’s not a conspiracy to suspect that an app from a Chinese company might contain software that undermines the privacy of its users. Even American companies have a not-so-great track record of respecting the privacy of their customers. But the company behind Temu has a well-documented history of using their apps to extract data from users’ devices.
That means that if you download the Temu app, you’re very likely giving the app and the company behind it access to every photo, contact, text message, and browsing history that’s on the device. Whether they use that data to extort you or just target you with more ads is entirely dependent on the whims of the company. But just be aware that there is a price to pay for lower prices.
That’s a lesson my mother often instilled in me when she took me shopping. It wasn’t just the old mantra of you get what you pay for. If you see cheap prices, there’s usually a reason they’re cheap. And that reason often comes at a price you can’t always put a dollar figure on.
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