When I want something cheap, I usually hit Aliexpress (website). As I was looking at the Aliexpress app page on the Google Play Store to check its privacy details, TEMU came up as a recommended app.
Now, my wife has used TEMU in the past, but since she often can’t find her way around things, I downplayed her negative experience as “user error”. That said, I went to the TEMU website and started looking around.
I found something that was a reasonable price, but then get this message saying I could get this item free through the app… sigh. OK. I sign up with my usual fake/random credentials and add this “free” item to my cart.
A spinning prize wheel comes up. Hey, I can get THREE free items now! Sweet. I spend the next 3 hours looking for stuff I can actually use, doom-scrolling through everything from women’s underwear to t-shirts with assault rifle print. Literally something for everyone. LOL
Then I select my third “free” item, and another spinning prize wheel comes up. “100% off the next $35”. Ok.
I didn’t need more stuff, but hey, 100% off sounds like more free stuff!
I spend another hour looking, keeping an eye on the amount “saved” (apparently $600+, for stuff that is sold on Aliexpress for maybe $25).
When I finally get to check out, I get another spinning prize wheel. “100% off $100”!! Goddamn, I’m on a roll here. How do these guys make any money?!!
More time looking… I must have spent well over 4 hours on their app. Time to check out.
$67? Huh? What about 100% off and all that nonsense? Enter your phone number*
- You must agree to get promotional texts, or you can’t check out… hmm, maybe my wife wasn’t wrong.
In any case, there was no way to actually get anything “free”. I deleted the app, deleted my account, and will never touch this scam ever again.
Do people actually end up getting anything from Temu? I thought AliExpress was bad, but the experience is 1000x better.
It’s not literally a scam, in that I’ve ordered things and they’ve arrived (in a timely fashion, actually), but the “free” stuff is pretty close to being one. The free credits or whatever are so over the top as to be eye rolling, so while they probably are officially a scam, I just couldn’t get too worked up.
Overall, it’s basically a tiny bit cheaper than AE, a tiny bit faster, but with more limited selection and they make the annoying gamification on AE look like the height of restraint and class. I found my personal line for trading time and tracking for cheap prices, and it’s between AE and Temu.
One tangential weird thing is that I’ve seen Shein, the fast fashion brand, has gone full “marketplace” and is now selling a lot of Temu like stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with clothes.
I bought two things. One of them had a message saying “Guaranteed by (X date) or you get a $5 credit.” Obviously that was the one item that showed up late. Sure enough, I get a $5 credit, followed by a bunch of emails on how I can get five or ten times the value out of my $5 credit.