2024-02-17 20:06:45
Temu’s online shopping app is storming the app store charts. You can get everything particularly cheap here. And that’s why caution is advised.
Who doesn’t love a real bargain in times of high inflation and rising prices? The online shop Temu is currently advertising incredibly low prices again – and the slogan “Shop like a billionaire!”.
The company is doing a lot of advertising on social networks and online advertising – with success. The app is the number one most popular application in the Apple and Google Play app stores. But despite the popularity of the online shop, criticism of it is becoming increasingly louder – including from consumer advocates in Germany.
Headphones for four, sonic toothbrush for five euros
If you look around the website (you have to register first), you will quickly notice how incredibly cheap the products are. There are Bluetooth headphones that cost just under four euros, T-shirts for three euros, sonic toothbrushes for five euros.
Even if some people are happy about the extreme bargains, others become suspicious of such prices. How can it be that a sonic toothbrush is available at Temu for just five euros when it can easily cost 100 euros elsewhere?
Users complain about poor quality
The answer: They are mostly cheap goods. On “Trustpilot” you can find many reviews that report the poor quality of the products. In some cases the goods do not work at all, are damaged or broken.
Some users even claim to have been scammed on Temu. They paid for their order, but the goods never arrived. There are also complaints about the “hard to reach” customer service, as well as about the countless emails with offers and discounts.
“Customer service not available”
“Customer service is usually almost impossible to reach, especially not in German. And returning goods to China is expensive and time-consuming and usually exceeds the price of the goods,” warns the Rhineland-Palatinate consumer protection center.
But there are also many positive reviews on “Trustpilot”. Despite the low prices, the quality is good, there are no delivery costs, the delivery itself is fast and the customer service is good. It is unclear whether these reviews are genuine. A noticeably large number of positive reviews contain a voucher code for the online shop.
Temu is based on marketplace system
The system behind it is also to blame for the criticism of Temu. Because this is less of a classic online shop and more of an internet marketplace – similar to AliExpress. Temu acts, so to speak, as an intermediary between the customers and the dealers, who are mostly based in China.
These marketplaces often offer goods from all sorts of areas – from electronics to fashion to furniture. This huge offer is also possible because these providers do not have their own warehouses. The customer orders on Temu, but actually buys products from a third party retailer.
Consumer advocates: Caution is advised when using the app
This also means that Temu or other internet marketplaces cannot check the quality of the goods on offer because they do not come into contact with them. On a large website with such an enormous offering, fraudsters can also sneak in and benefit from the hype surrounding the app.
When it comes to the Temu app, the consumer advocates from Mainz warn: “It should make you suspicious that a shopping app requires access to the camera, microphone, photos and the user’s address book. Because this data is not necessary for the app to function, for example .”
So if you really want to shop “like a billionaire,” you should be careful. Even though Temu is not a rip-off website per se, there is some risk of falling into a trap or receiving a product of inferior quality. If you need a new sonic toothbrush or Bluetooth headphones, you are better off buying such devices from a specialist store.