Say what you may of Temu, and I do think more vetting of certain goods is a good idea, but they fill a very real need. In the part of Europe where I live, the choice is only between intermediaries for the same products coming from China. The local intermediaries sell a very limited picking at staggering margins. And when it comes to certain things, like electronic components, the choice is between importing (old) American stock with a German company as the intermediary, and that's $$$$ and many weeks of shipping, or using Temu or Aliexpress.
There's something unpleasantly snobbish with the way business is done here, a spirit of "if you have to ask the price, our business is not for you". For example, in Instagram, "Local offerings" pop up all the time in the feed. The ones which are truly local end up in a "call us to know more" button, no pricing info disclosed. The ones that show actual prices tend to be shell companies with no employees, no doubt a thin wrapper around an importer from Asia.
Yea, worst is the retail people who clearly hated Temu/Aliexpress etc because they stand no chance at competing with them when they sell the same things but at 10 times the cost (I don’t blame them. Sucks for them) but instead of just saying the truth that they hate the competition they just make up these fake reasons ”oh it’s low quality stuff that will break” when it’s clearly the same stuff from the same factories etc.
yes, i'm very in favor of the shift towards direct-to-consumer among chinese retailers, but that might be because i'm not actually all that sympathetic to small business
There is some validity to a marketplace selling items from a larger range of retailers, however the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.
> the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.
There are some that are genuinely dangerous and bad for society, but there are tons of goods that are "the same thing but half the price because it lasts a quarter the time" that have genuine utility.
Harbor Freight has basically made a drop-shipping business out of it. I often have tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times.
Copy that over a bunch of verticals and it starts to make sense. Clothing for a costume I'll wear maybe twice, niche cooking gadgets for very specific things, tools to do a one-time repair on a car, a flash drive to turn over photos to family members, yada yada.
> some that are genuinely dangerous ... tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times
Forehead hit hood, but I caught myself so it was a gentle reminder instead of a concussion. I should have splurged that time I broke a socket tightening an axle bolt. 150 ft-lbs + 180 degrees is a fair bit of torque.
There is a part of conservatism and resistance to change. Online commerce has been seen as "suspicious" by some from the beginning to the point that in, for instance, France free delivery on books is banned... of course this just means that amazon.fr charges 1 cent, instead but it is symptomatic of a state of mind.
The EU's approach to imports from PRoC is the regulatory equivalent of trying to 'test your way to quality' (which Deming showed to be nearly impossible). Attempts to use regulatory fines and prosecutions to ensure compliance from PRoC products is a whack-a-mole exercise which will fail.
Every major PRoC company is required to have CCP ties; in addition to 'paying for facilitation' by local officials, a certain percentage of their employees must be CCP members.
Ties as in pay tax to ccp. In China Temu is called pinduoduo (拼多多）and you can buy some wild stuff there, the regulation on mainland seems also pretty lax i mean.
Sorry, ties, as CCP party committees inside private firms. And in case of Temu, it also has a data-sharing agreement with People's Daily [1], a CCP controlled media group.
Just image having a mandatory political party inside every American corporation which the board has no control over.
I would even go further and say that the term really has to be almost "equal" - equal access, equal rules, equal legislation or the market isn't really free.
From Claude: The €200 million penalty equals around 0.4% of the global turnover reported last year by Temu's parent company PDD Holdings.
According to Eurostat, the average gross annual salary in the EU is around €39,800 per year for full-time employment. The average net salary comes to roughly €2,461 per month, or about €29,500 net per year.
0.4% of an average worker's gross annual salary = roughly €159.
The fine is for activity in the EU, so compare it to their business there. Comparing apples to advertisement fliers is useful only if you are using the fliers as toilet paper substitutes.
It seems like quite a light punishment for selling such dangerous products that could literally kill people. The dodgy e-bike batteries have already been linked to several fires.
bigclivedotcom takes apart some of the Temu stuff on YouTube and some of the electronics is atrocious.
They sell adapters to turn oil cans into silencers. Each one should be a violation of the National Firearms Act and subject to up to a half million dollar fine https://www.atf.gov/media/25071/download Nota bened; these are not per-se illegal, but you need to sell them through a firearms dealer and pay for an ATF tax stamp and only in states that have not banned them/all NFA items.
This. Same for the Chinese mainland app, some wild stuff like that being sold (firearms are highly regulated, but 1:1 copies seem to be ok, maybe because of the high level of regulation?)
I see, the issue is those parcels are mailed directly, not from a logistics operation already inside EU borders.
In my country the government is pushing those companies to have local warehouses. So if items are bulk imported by the marketplace, in theory it should be easier to inspect.
> Are you suggesting opening every package to check for a CE?
In the old days, when an importer purchased Chinese goods in bulk and resold them, import checks were commonplace.... AND the importer was legally responsible for paying import duties and selling goods to the public that were legal and met safety standards.
Now that any individual can order direct from China (with cheap subsidised postage!), the floodgates of untaxed and dangerous shite are open.
One solution is to address the subsidised postage that makes this state of affairs possible.
That’s unworkable: asking a recipient unfamiliar with producers to know whether producer is reputable or not in advance and if the producer is unscrupulous you expect every affected buyer to follow up or be in violation of importation laws?
I think thats asking much from people some of whom easily get scammed by phone banks in Eastern Europe, India etc. many people will not put in that effort.
I think the parent is questioning how the fine relates to removing the goods from circulation?
Or is the intention of the law to allow for an unlimited number of supposedly illegal goods to circulate freely within the EU, just fined appropriately?
With a few exceptions, those labels do not mean that the product has actually been tested or actually complies with the standard. They are a self-certification: CE means “I promise this complies with European norms”, but the entity deciding to print that on a product may not be honest. Small fly-by-night operations on the other side of the planet have little incentive to be honest.
Generally speaking, international direct-to-consumer e-commerce is a problem for trying to enforce these kinds of rules. The whole model of checks at the border works well for massive bulk shipments, which not only are few enough in number that customs have a chance of doing a proper job on them, but there's also a commercial importer taking a large financial risk on the shipment and therefore 1) having an incentive to ensure they import something safe to begin with, 2) they can be practically fined/sued by authorities if they screw up. But when you have myriad tiny operations selling direct to consumers, the consumer is the importer, and there's no local representative for the manufacturer that you can actually sue. It's effectively a quite lawless area. Being able to do direct imports is an important freedom, and this kind of laxity is inevitable, but it's understandable the EU wants to do something about the flood of poor-quality goods that are terrible for fair competition, the environment, and health and safety.
There is such a thing. The Chinese Export one was specifically created to intentionally be confusable with the real CE marking (Conformité Européenne). And it works exactly as intended. People see “CE” and think it’s the real CE one but it’s the intentionally confusable one.
For electronics without wireless functionality, it is allowed to self-certify. Anyone could also print whatever label they want on their products illegally (i.e. without doing the required paperwork to self-certify).
The policemen controlling imports don't have the competency to check for faults, so we get this situation where specialists regularly sample the products, and heavy fines are issued to the importer.
And for electronics with wireless, they still just ignore everything. No FCC ID, don't even have any silkscreening on the pcb or markings on the ICs. Nothing gets enforced.
Feels like the EU is always going to find something to fine you over. Think of it as a tax. The purpose is compensating for the lack of notable domestic tech giants.
The EU began enforcing a small parcel tax directly against Temu last May [0] and France has been strongly lobbying against Shein and Temu [1]. The EU has also made Chinese overproduction a critical topic of discussion for EU-China relations [2][3], and barring Temu and Shein is backed by both unions and industrial groups within Europe [4].
All of this is linking to the EU's strategy of playing hardball against Chinese support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine [5][6], as well as pushing back against the Chinese perception that the EU is a has-been [7] as well as conducting an active info-war against a European state [8].
… which found that a high percentage of chargers purchased through Temu failed basic electrical safety tests. It also found that a high proportion of baby toys posed safety risks, containing chemicals above legal limits or featuring small detachable parts that presented suffocation hazards…
Boring. I can probably find the exact same on Amazon. From the headline, I was hoping the list of illegal products was going to be something like enriched plutonium, RPGs, Lawn Darts, etc
Say what you may of Temu, and I do think more vetting of certain goods is a good idea, but they fill a very real need. In the part of Europe where I live, the choice is only between intermediaries for the same products coming from China. The local intermediaries sell a very limited picking at staggering margins. And when it comes to certain things, like electronic components, the choice is between importing (old) American stock with a German company as the intermediary, and that's $$$$ and many weeks of shipping, or using Temu or Aliexpress.
There's something unpleasantly snobbish with the way business is done here, a spirit of "if you have to ask the price, our business is not for you". For example, in Instagram, "Local offerings" pop up all the time in the feed. The ones which are truly local end up in a "call us to know more" button, no pricing info disclosed. The ones that show actual prices tend to be shell companies with no employees, no doubt a thin wrapper around an importer from Asia.
What part of Europe is that? Is it is in the EU?
Yea, worst is the retail people who clearly hated Temu/Aliexpress etc because they stand no chance at competing with them when they sell the same things but at 10 times the cost (I don’t blame them. Sucks for them) but instead of just saying the truth that they hate the competition they just make up these fake reasons ”oh it’s low quality stuff that will break” when it’s clearly the same stuff from the same factories etc.
yes, i'm very in favor of the shift towards direct-to-consumer among chinese retailers, but that might be because i'm not actually all that sympathetic to small business
There is some validity to a marketplace selling items from a larger range of retailers, however the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.
> the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.
There are some that are genuinely dangerous and bad for society, but there are tons of goods that are "the same thing but half the price because it lasts a quarter the time" that have genuine utility.
Harbor Freight has basically made a drop-shipping business out of it. I often have tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times.
Copy that over a bunch of verticals and it starts to make sense. Clothing for a costume I'll wear maybe twice, niche cooking gadgets for very specific things, tools to do a one-time repair on a car, a flash drive to turn over photos to family members, yada yada.
> some that are genuinely dangerous ... tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times
Forehead hit hood, but I caught myself so it was a gentle reminder instead of a concussion. I should have splurged that time I broke a socket tightening an axle bolt. 150 ft-lbs + 180 degrees is a fair bit of torque.
There is a part of conservatism and resistance to change. Online commerce has been seen as "suspicious" by some from the beginning to the point that in, for instance, France free delivery on books is banned... of course this just means that amazon.fr charges 1 cent, instead but it is symptomatic of a state of mind.
Interesting! They tried using lockers so it could still be free:
https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/amazon-is-wrong-to-use-...
The EU's approach to imports from PRoC is the regulatory equivalent of trying to 'test your way to quality' (which Deming showed to be nearly impossible). Attempts to use regulatory fines and prosecutions to ensure compliance from PRoC products is a whack-a-mole exercise which will fail.
Does Amazon or eBay get the same fine? Haha it’s the same people on all of these sites …. Just some dropshipping ?
Amazon is also under investigation under DSA, eBay is not big enough (in the EU) to matter under this law.
Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307237
I’m curious if its actually difficult or trivial for Temu to enforce
I am very pro free market, but Temu with data harvesting and selling illegal projects should be banned together with tiktok...
As if Amazon don’t harvest data or have illegal products on its marketplace.
Doesn’t TEMU have CCP ties? Free market is for businesses and individuals and foreign govt entities should not unfairly benefit from a free market.
Every major PRoC company is required to have CCP ties; in addition to 'paying for facilitation' by local officials, a certain percentage of their employees must be CCP members.
All big companies in China are partially run by the CCP. Just how it works there.
Everybody in china that gets big has CCP ties. No way around it. Their car manufacturers are all propped up by government.
Ties as in pay tax to ccp. In China Temu is called pinduoduo (拼多多）and you can buy some wild stuff there, the regulation on mainland seems also pretty lax i mean.
Sorry, ties, as CCP party committees inside private firms. And in case of Temu, it also has a data-sharing agreement with People's Daily [1], a CCP controlled media group.
Just image having a mandatory political party inside every American corporation which the board has no control over.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/01/...
I’d start with the immense packaging waste and shameless overconsumption tricks that are banned in basically any other industry.
If you're "pro free market, but", you're not pro free market. That's fine, but you might want to reevaluate whether you're actually for it.
Free markets can have strong rules. No other than Adam Smith said they are needed.
I would even go further and say that the term really has to be almost "equal" - equal access, equal rules, equal legislation or the market isn't really free.
The US and China have standards as well and bodies to regulate them. Regulation vs Free Market debate isn't a binary issue and is a spectrum.
Big corp penny slap on the fingers. I dont this amount will change behaviour or incentive to make larger profit.
A real slap on the wrist of the CEO by a wronged customer would leave a more lasting impression.
It sets precedent, and has already led to a (by Chinese foreign policy standards) fairly vicious response [0][1][2].
This is also part of the EU's larger tariffs against China [3].
[0] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1361926.shtml
[1] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1362200.shtml
[2] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1362161.shtml
[3] - https://www.ft.com/content/e28fe696-ac30-4543-a105-febc82789...
From Claude: The €200 million penalty equals around 0.4% of the global turnover reported last year by Temu's parent company PDD Holdings.
According to Eurostat, the average gross annual salary in the EU is around €39,800 per year for full-time employment. The average net salary comes to roughly €2,461 per month, or about €29,500 net per year.
0.4% of an average worker's gross annual salary = roughly €159.
Quick, reinterpret with your own faculties! (Model output got itself banned here) - friendly message :)
The fine is for activity in the EU, so compare it to their business there. Comparing apples to advertisement fliers is useful only if you are using the fliers as toilet paper substitutes.
It seems like quite a light punishment for selling such dangerous products that could literally kill people. The dodgy e-bike batteries have already been linked to several fires.
bigclivedotcom takes apart some of the Temu stuff on YouTube and some of the electronics is atrocious.
Check will prowse. Western brands aren’t that much better.
They sell adapters to turn oil cans into silencers. Each one should be a violation of the National Firearms Act and subject to up to a half million dollar fine https://www.atf.gov/media/25071/download Nota bened; these are not per-se illegal, but you need to sell them through a firearms dealer and pay for an ATF tax stamp and only in states that have not banned them/all NFA items.
This. Same for the Chinese mainland app, some wild stuff like that being sold (firearms are highly regulated, but 1:1 copies seem to be ok, maybe because of the high level of regulation?)
How many dead babies or battery fires post Temu, seems like good opportunity to conduct a before/after study on cost:ratio of EU regulations.
Isn't there some kind of law to disallow imports without a CE / RoHS / etc label? Why allow it to enter the EU, and then fine the seller afterwards?
How would it be enforced? It is around 16 000 000 packages per day.
Are you suggesting opening every package to check for a CE? I think fining after the fact is how those laws are enforced.
I see, the issue is those parcels are mailed directly, not from a logistics operation already inside EU borders.
In my country the government is pushing those companies to have local warehouses. So if items are bulk imported by the marketplace, in theory it should be easier to inspect.
> Are you suggesting opening every package to check for a CE?
In the old days, when an importer purchased Chinese goods in bulk and resold them, import checks were commonplace.... AND the importer was legally responsible for paying import duties and selling goods to the public that were legal and met safety standards.
Now that any individual can order direct from China (with cheap subsidised postage!), the floodgates of untaxed and dangerous shite are open.
One solution is to address the subsidised postage that makes this state of affairs possible.
Require the recipient affirm the package meets all legal requirements, and personally assume liability for any violation.
So hold the consumer liable for laws meant to protect the consumer?
That’s unworkable: asking a recipient unfamiliar with producers to know whether producer is reputable or not in advance and if the producer is unscrupulous you expect every affected buyer to follow up or be in violation of importation laws?
If you are not sure, buy from within the EU from an importer who deals with this.
The old system of spot inspections worked because most import volume was from known, repeat importers.
I think thats asking much from people some of whom easily get scammed by phone banks in Eastern Europe, India etc. many people will not put in that effort.
The fine is the application of the law. Would be like getting arrested and demanding to know why the authorities aren't getting involved.
I think the parent is questioning how the fine relates to removing the goods from circulation?
Or is the intention of the law to allow for an unlimited number of supposedly illegal goods to circulate freely within the EU, just fined appropriately?
With a few exceptions, those labels do not mean that the product has actually been tested or actually complies with the standard. They are a self-certification: CE means “I promise this complies with European norms”, but the entity deciding to print that on a product may not be honest. Small fly-by-night operations on the other side of the planet have little incentive to be honest.
Generally speaking, international direct-to-consumer e-commerce is a problem for trying to enforce these kinds of rules. The whole model of checks at the border works well for massive bulk shipments, which not only are few enough in number that customs have a chance of doing a proper job on them, but there's also a commercial importer taking a large financial risk on the shipment and therefore 1) having an incentive to ensure they import something safe to begin with, 2) they can be practically fined/sued by authorities if they screw up. But when you have myriad tiny operations selling direct to consumers, the consumer is the importer, and there's no local representative for the manufacturer that you can actually sue. It's effectively a quite lawless area. Being able to do direct imports is an important freedom, and this kind of laxity is inevitable, but it's understandable the EU wants to do something about the flood of poor-quality goods that are terrible for fair competition, the environment, and health and safety.
They add fake labels, this has been happening for a long time
Yeah they have the CE mark, but it means "Chinese Export". You can recognize it by the C and E being closer together.
There is no such thing as "Chinese Export".
https://cemarkingassociation.co.uk/latest-news/ce-marking-an...
There is such a thing. The Chinese Export one was specifically created to intentionally be confusable with the real CE marking (Conformité Européenne). And it works exactly as intended. People see “CE” and think it’s the real CE one but it’s the intentionally confusable one.
https://www.kimuagroup.com/news/differences-between-ce-and-c...
https://starfishmedical.com/resource/conformite-europeenne-m...
Who says the products don’t have fake CE labels stuck on? A CE label does not - as far as I can tell - have any security features.
For electronics without wireless functionality, it is allowed to self-certify. Anyone could also print whatever label they want on their products illegally (i.e. without doing the required paperwork to self-certify).
The policemen controlling imports don't have the competency to check for faults, so we get this situation where specialists regularly sample the products, and heavy fines are issued to the importer.
And for electronics with wireless, they still just ignore everything. No FCC ID, don't even have any silkscreening on the pcb or markings on the ICs. Nothing gets enforced.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307237
Why there is a difference between selling and allowing to sell? If the product is sold in your site, you must be responsible of it.
Isn't this being held responsible for it?
Yes, this "section 230" treatment of online platforms is at the core of why social media and the internet in general is full of garbage.
If you sell something on your site, or allow users to post something on your site, you should have some liability for the consequences.
they are responsible for it, but it's useful in reporting to differentiate between "fulfilled by" and "bought through"
> If the product is sold in your site, you must be responsible of it.
But this is an internet store.
Temu also should be fined for predatory marketing. Not sure if laws exist, but dark patterns are everywhere.
I try to a avoid Temu, but they have some good traits, too, like quick and convinient shipping.
EU is a fine organization
Feels like the EU is always going to find something to fine you over. Think of it as a tax. The purpose is compensating for the lack of notable domestic tech giants.
This has been going on for a year now.
The EU began enforcing a small parcel tax directly against Temu last May [0] and France has been strongly lobbying against Shein and Temu [1]. The EU has also made Chinese overproduction a critical topic of discussion for EU-China relations [2][3], and barring Temu and Shein is backed by both unions and industrial groups within Europe [4].
All of this is linking to the EU's strategy of playing hardball against Chinese support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine [5][6], as well as pushing back against the Chinese perception that the EU is a has-been [7] as well as conducting an active info-war against a European state [8].
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/102e18d7-d06b-4405-a347-97bb3c373...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/b1fdbad1-2793-4975-a10b-74bb928d3...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/eu-law...
[3] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20260326IP...
[4] - https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2025/09/15/les-indus...
[5] - https://www.bruegel.org/podcast/how-war-ukraine-reshaping-eu...
[6] - https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2025-01-...
[7] - https://fddi.fudan.edu.cn/_t2515/57/f8/c21257a743416/page.ht...
[8] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...
> Chinese overproduction a critical topic of discussion for EU-China relations
Ah of course, I do want the state regulating what I can and cannot buy when it comes to junk. Only approved goods should be allowed.
European QoL is predicated on protecting European industry. Why should European workers lose their jobs because you want to buy something cheaper?
If you don't build nor buy European, you become a vassal of either the US or China.
This is something like an individual being fined $200?
Seems fine
I mean that was the whole point of Temu... buy shit dirt cheap because over-regulation harms the consumer.
The EU is only good at imposing massive fines and they like to regulate technologies they have not created and don't even host them.
TEMO will more than likely just pass the cost of this onto EU consumers.
As an EU consumer, I appreciate laws and regulations that ban selling cheap junk that might burn my house down or poison my baby.
I take it you don't?
In my limited experience not all countries do think like this.