It's easy to find "real brands" if one looks outside of Amazon, Alibaba, etc.
Surprisingly, I find I am more pleased with purchases I make outside of Amazon despite all of Amazon's perks. "Platforms" like Amazon and fake "brands" aside, online retailers that only sell "real brands" are still around; they never disappeared despite Amazon's meteoric rise. Many sell through Amazon but also sell outside Amazon, too. Some do not sell through Amazon.
Being born before the internet existed, I started ordering products delivered by mail in the catalog era. I am biased toward locating "real brands" that have built reputations for high quality. I miss these brands. I loved the transition from catalogs to websites, but it seems like in the last 10-15 years fake "brands" that can offer no promises whatsoever have been killing off the motivation for having real ones that guarantee high quality.
When I went to Shenzhen I found some of these brands with stalls in their vast malls. They're real places. As you walk through you navigate around an obstacle course of dollies, hear endless packing tape and occasionally point out, "oh look, there's Owawuwo, I got a cheap projector from them".
Americans can get a Shenzhen-only 5-day Visa on arrival (VOA) from Hong Kong through the Luohu entry at the LoWu station via the regular MTR. Don't take the HSR, they do not offer it there and you will be turned away. You Must go to the office at Louhu station, it is the only way. It's easy, just take the metro.
Anyways, at LoWu it takes about 45 minutes after doing the paper work. It was very easy. Visa approval for Americans this exact way is estimated to be north of 98%. Exchange your HKD at the government run forex up stairs in the mall after entering China, it's a 1.5% commission, best I've ever seen. Then pay in cash - your Western credit cards Will Not Work. It is a fairly easy day trip - about 45min from Kowloon by rail. The 5-day Visa is a Single Entry.
To go to the trading district take Luobao line (#1) to Huaqianglu (3 stops). It's a 10 minute train trip or a fairly uneventful hour walk if you're up to it. English at the trading district and the border mall is ok. Everywhere else, not so much.
Recommended. The place is absolutely bonkers.
They have this wildly intricate culture of price bargaining. If you're looking to actually buy stuff, you can get amazing deals. But I just went as a tourist.
> It's easy to find "real brands" if one looks outside of Amazon, Alibaba, etc.
You have to be careful, though. There are a shocking number of legit-looking brands with their own sites that are just drop-shipping the same stuff, at an enormous markup. My wife found a piece of clothing she liked for $60; a quick image search found it (with the exact same images) for $8 on Shein. Nice hustle, if you can make it work.
I've found I buy fewer things in general, and also the things I do buy are of higher quality when I do it in person. Might even get some useful advice if it's something like a tool. Also it's just more fun, especially if it's a nice bike ride, walk, or trip on transit.
> And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
This is why I have a bunch of stock in Shopify. It's slowly started rolling out discovery features in its Shop app that federates its stores. I try to limit my use on Amazon to things I know can't be faked and things that are so much cheaper that I can deal with it being fake. My purchasing trends have definitely moved toward the edges - aliexpress for chinese stuff (that would normally be on Amazon) and Shopify for "buy it for life" stuff.
I'm going to genuinely miss the bicycle headlight I have bought under like 4 different brand names. I won't miss the 36 other grotesqueries sold as alternatives and produced by the same business and manufacturing environment, but I'm also not excited about having to choose between 6 $50 lights of similar quality that are locked to a GPS company's equipment. It would be great if in 10 years I could get a similar light for 25% more than the current price adjusted for future inflation. But there's no reason to believe that tariffs are going to make American products better, just that it makes the cheap products American. And there's nothing else about Trump's (or for that matter his Democratic counterparts'-) industrial policy to encourage that either.
15 different variants of the same product, all obviously cheaply made from the same factory, with varying degrees of quality control and reviews strewn about the various “brands” of the product so that it’s much harder to have a negative review everywhere.
Yeah, this sucks. Though the correct thing to do here is to enforce this hygiene on the platforms themselves. They have every resource and means to be able to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It’s just more profitable for them not to
There are flecks of gold in the midst of all that dirt.
I needed to make a 3/4" hole in a 1/8" thick mild steel angle to repair a cart. Didn't have a drill bit that size and quickly realized that a hole saw would be a better choice. Off to Amazon. After some browsing, found the same 3/4" carbide-tipped holesaw from a million resellers. Found a package of two for $13. Following the logic of "even if they only last for one hole, it's still cheaper than buying a good drill bit that I'll never use again", I ordered it. Item arrived and it looked as cheaply made as the photo!
But what do I have to lose? For $13, it's worth a shot.
Chucked up the holesaw, dripped some cutting oil on the metal and went to work. Fricking thing went through the steel like it wasn't even there. I was fully expecting that the teeth would chip off and go flying about halfway through, or it wouldn't do crap and the metal would work-harden, making my job even harder or worst case, the entire flimsy-looking thing would shatter (I have excellent safety glasses BTW). No, about 1 minute later I had a nice clean 3/4" hole with perfect edges that didn't even need deburring.
That led to the first Amazon review that I ever wrote: I was that shocked at how well it performed. Turned on my (Amazon-bought) stick welder and finished the repair.
I ended up drastically cutting back on Amazon purchases when they started getting flooded with brands like that.
Its absolutely on Amazon to maintain quality. There are certain brands and types of products I'll order there because they're just harder to find otherwise, but its mostly a last resort these days given that Amazon doesn't care to curate what is on their "shelves".
Yeah, and it's not even necessarily a problem with the product itself. Sometimes I do want something cheap and disposable. The problem is that you have roughly zero information about the retailer, and manufacturer, and anyone in between. If one product listing gets bad reviews, someone can spin up 5 more listings with slightly different metadata. It's effectively a Sybil attack against the reputation system of the market.
> I was very pleased with my "[brand name, if applicable] toilet seat, (2-pack), premium pure white, toolless installation", that I purchased for my family. Would definitely recommend it to friends and family. It arrived promptly and was in perfect condition. You exceeded your current quota please check your plan and billing details.
The above is similar to recent reviews I've seen.
It's infuriating that there is a reliance on user reporting to find and report COMPLETELY OBVIOUS fake reviews on Amazon. A great example of why competition is necessary, and not just from one other entity equally interested in allowing the others existing to avoid being a "monopoly"
My favorite is all these letter-soup Firewire-to-USB convertors which are just glue and random wires inside and are either completely inert or disastrously damaging to your peripherals:
I literally got a Firewire to USB converter yesterday to try and pull video off a DV Camcorder. A video capture card in the same price range had worked great for letting me stream VHS tapes through OBS Studio.
There are various YouTube videos showing a daisy chain of Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 1/2 adapters connected to various Firewire cables and adapters. I was hoping to avoid all of that but the camera doesn't show at all. Fortunately, nothing seems damaged on either side.
I've only got 6 tapes so I'm sending them off to a service and sending the adapter back to Amazon.
You may get rid of that, but it's still Amazon. Just recently, they fuzzed all their search results further, so when you search for something, it will give you lots of stuff you didn't search for. Similar to how Facebook Marketplace does.
I think the only way to avoid disappointment is to avoid Amazon altogether. Their customer experience is extremely deceptive and engineered to make you spend the most money. From the featured searches all the way to how it charges you paid shipping instead of free at checkout.
We should all feel burned enough at this point and stop rewarding them. Bezos purchased the Washington Post for all this money, and he won't stop there.
it's the whole point of the tariffs. China does an end run around all of our laws, consumer safety, human rights, workers conditions, intellectual property, all that, and in doing so they cut costs and beat domestic companies at the market. Tariffs are a tax we charge to represent those things they have immorally refused to do while participating in our market.
A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
What zamalek describes isn't just that China manufactures cheap products. The complain is more about retailers or marketplaces (particularly online ones) that encourage essentially anonymous, zero-cost seller accounts and product listings.
Traditional retailers like Target or Costco also sell a lot of cheap Chinese stuff, but they don't have quite the same level of junk in their listings.
Do you mean this is the point of a carefully planned, deliberated, executed, and announced tariff rollout, or do you mean that's the whole point of tariffs as they are currently being implemented in the United States?
> A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
Australia (I live there) has free trade, a high minimum wage (USD$16/hr) which is strictly enforced, no tariffs to speak of, and used to share the same values as the USA (in the last 100 days no so much). Australia has been that way for decades. In other words: your wrong, despite what "common sense" might tell you.
There are far more glaring examples, like Singapore. Almost no natural resources to exploit, no tariffs to speak of, and a median yearly income of USD$66,000. The USA's median income is USD$40,000.
Now look at countries with high tariffs, or even just "higher than the USA used to have" tariffs. All of them, and I do mean off of them, including China, have living standards well below those with very low tariffs. So you are not just wrong. Empirical evidence says you have it completely arse about.
after 50 years of de-industrialization in US, it's a sad fact that US can no longer produce most of those items, yes it's totally gone. It will take a few decades to rebuild, if possible at all. For now, whatever those junks are at Amazon, there are not many options to procure them elsewhere.
I can see how hitting the EU with tariffs is going to improve human rights ... oh wait.
But on a more serious note, tariffs could have been used for what you are saying, and it would have been a beautiful thing, but I think we can agree that's not what's happening here, can't we?
I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years. Mostly little electronics parts and specialized tools for my workshop. Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much. Obviously it's over now. Anyone getting a package in May will be hit with a $75-$150 or more bill per package, even a 75 cent envelope will be charged +$75. I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering. I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet. I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks.
> I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years.
> I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering.
I personally feel bad for the environment and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production. Good if the beneficiaries are gone from your part of the world.
I've been short on work, which means I've been poor. I use my off time to work on side projects that I simply could not afford to complete if I paid what US companies charge for tools, components, and custom PCBs. My ability to innovate is seriously impacted by these tarrifs and there is no alternative that I can afford.
I recently created something that people in my industry actually want to buy, but I only ordered enough parts for 5 units. I had priced them so that when I sold them, I'd be able to put larger orders in to begin getting quantity discounts. Only problem is, what was going to be a $2k order will now cost roughly $5k, and guess what? I didn't charge $1k apiece. Now I'm out of stock and stuck in limbo waiting to earn cash from my regular job and see how these tarrifs shake out.
1 item per day is certainly not efficient, but nowadays temu and aliexpress batch things over a small period so that shouldn't really happen...
> and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production
Remember that taking away bad jobs does not save anyone, quite the contrary. People go from having shit jobs to no jobs, or even worse jobs with lower-profile companies.
Helping them requires creating vast numbers of better paying jobs with better working condition in their country, which require redirecting vast amounts of money to those countries. E.g., by buying even more stuff from those regions, but from manufacturers paying better wages (and selling goods more expensively), so they end up having to massively expand and hire more.
I fully agree on the environmental part. Shipping all this stuff individually is incredibly wasteful. Even the combined packages from AliExpress someone else mentioned this is the case, since there's a ton of unnecessary packaging wasting space and resources.
On the 'losing side' part I agree a lot less. In the recent past, most of these items would be sold by mega corps, marked up multiple times with most of the profits flowing into shareholder's pockets. Meanwhile, the average consumer is over paying for the exact same 'low quality junk' with branding like Logitech, Dell or Amazon Basics on it. Now we can get the same (or often better) quality straight from the source, often for a fraction of the price. To me, that's a big win.
You remind me of Chamath Palihapitiya. He's this billionaire who likes to call things "cheap low quality junk" too, but for him it's anything is under like $5000, or not made in Milan or the French riviera. He's hamming it up for the audience but the point is the same. Every strata of wealth has the luxury of not buying the "cheap low quality junk" of the strata below it. To you, they are temu possessions, but to another person they are just their possessions. Everyone would love to be wealthy enough to never check a pricetag. And even then, plenty of products last just as long no matter what you spend on them. Many things are literally identical and just marked up 10x by the middleman who imported it to your local store.
> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet.
Well, why would you waste the opportunity to enrage Americans against their government, for free? "Your $5 package has arrived on time, now you only have to pay the $75 extra that the candidate you voted for has decided to take from you". It's the best ads campaign ever, and it's entirely free.
They don't pay the tariffs. The person receiving the package does. Many carriers will slap you with the tariff charge, a brokerage fee, and then send you to collections if you don't pay it.
The vendors don't care because they're making the sale and the tariffs are the other person's responsibility. Caveat emptor.
Wait why would $0.75 have a $75 charge? Is there a minimum tariff that’s not as widely reported reported on? That would be a 10000% tariff. Or is this just exaggeration
> Washington will also increase the per postal item fee on goods entering after May 2 and before June 1 to $100 from the planned $75. Parcels entering after June 1 will pay a fee of $200 per item instead of $150 announced previously, according to the Wednesday order.
One positive that could still come out of the tariffs is the US consuming less junk.
I just spent a few months in Germany, and the trash can for our APARTMENT BUILDING is roughly half of the size of the one at my single family home in the US. And here I see lots of my neighbors overflowing their 96 gallon wheeled tote very week. The world would be much better off with out all of this waste.
Germany is definitely top-tier on reducing waste. Before I left the UK it had got to the point where actual landfill-bound unrecyclable trash was a tiny portion of the waste output.
The sad thing is, UK and Germany are tiny compared to all the other countries that don't give a shit.
I live in Germany. One reason the toters can be smaller is because there places to dispose of your recyclable goods (free) on almost every corner. The toters are just for compost and regular trash.
Aliexpress my impression is you can get "useful" stuff that are odd but usable. But I've had the impression that temu and shein was all "direct to garbage" devices, was this not the case?
They sell the same stuff in my experience. I would describe Temu as selling the top 10% of AliExpress that's the most popular, with faster and more reliable shipping since they use huge centralized fulfillment warehouses, similar to Amazon warehouses.
I've only used Temu a few times, but in my limited experience it is just Aliexpress but with a slick gamified interface on top. Alibaba sellers supplies the same stuff to Aliexpress, Temu, a ton of the Instagram ads and even a lot of the cheap Amazon stuff.
You can't lump shein and temu in the same bucket. My wife is an avid shein user and from what I can tell the quality so far is really good for what you pay.
Shein is in reality just an aliexpress/baba wrapper, but they put huge amounts of effort into accurate sizing charts for their clothing, and their customer reviews system actively incentivises buyers to upload pictures of themselves wearing the purchased clothing. So as a potential buyer you can actually see the piece of clothing being worn by someone with a similar body shape than your own.
My impression of temu is they are trying to be as misleading as possible with their listings, and the value for money is absolutely terrible because of that: you think you are getting a 6' xmas tree for $20, but when it arrives it's 6".
I'm sorry for your convenience loss, but I'm happy for the environment.
Not only because of the unrestricted consumerism, but also because of the environmental costs of logistics. I too have ordered fusible resistors from aliexpress that I could not find locally.
But things I barely need, only for a small dopamine kick ? I do my best to not have a small baggie shipped from the other side of the planet for that.
And not even mentioning the effects of insatiability on myself.
The resistors to your local store have to go through logistics as well. And doing the last mile yourself is a lot more inefficient than a post service doing it.
Transport is also quite small fraction of most products' environmental costs.
Who would have thought that Trump would bring in a policy that would benefit the environment? Also, who would have guessed that right wing governments would start buying Tesla's? Quite a plot twist ..
I bought a bunch of off-brand Lego kits usually with Chinese themes (pagodas, nine-tailed foxes) from Temu. What I thought was hilarious about Temu was that the size of things was usually different from you had in mind. Most of the time Temu items were smaller than I imagined but once in a while you'd get something much bigger.
> Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much.
Most things I have bought on Ali express have no US source. I also have mostly bought small electronics and components and generally pay the Amazon premium for speed and only go to Ali express when I can’t find what I need, so third is quite a bummer to hear as I’d simply have no source for that item. Although, it did seem too good to be true, the minimal shipping costs that is.
There is a minimum fee for packages, yes. At this point I've lost track of all the changes but at one point I remember seeing $100 or $150 per package under some conditions.
Carriers will also charge a fee for brokering it. USPS has a $9 fee, other carriers are higher.
We went from being free to order things internationally to having out of control fees and taxes on top of everything.
There's a lot of sneering at Temu and Shein, but the hobbyist and electronics worlds are about to get hit extremely hard by the lack of access to tools and parts from Aliexpress. It's really sad.
After the inavsion of Ukraine and sanctions were put on Russia every western company laundered their goods through Kazakhstan and into Russia. Im sure we will see a similar situation whith chinese goods finding their way into the country via vietnam.
> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet
Some people are reporting seeing tiktoks - not "ads", but regular videos, inasmuch as there's a difference - where Chinese vendors are saying "see, this is the factory that makes US brands such as lululemon, why not cut out the middleman and buy direct?"
> I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks
There's been several reversals already. If trade policy is done by whim, why not wait for a reversal as soon as it starts to bite?
The whole category of "US business dependent on Chinese imports for inputs" is probably toast in the meantime. This includes a lot of kickstarters.
My dad was in manufacturing and later importing so growing up I got to learn a lot about the process. He had worked for Heinz when I was young and would always buy the ketchup from some store brands that was about 60% of the cost. He was like, yea we bottle this on the same line as the name brand product.
The same hold true for imports. And yea there is a lot of cheap Chinese junk, but if you know what you're looking for you can find the same Chinese products that get name branded and marked up 200-2000% here in the US.
The problem with all of these is it's just going to cause and economic downturn where people purchase less, but more US products aren't going to sell. They simply aren't built here, and even if they are they'd still be many times more expensive. Even with the tariffs it would still be cheaper from China.
realistically speaking, it is likely not possible to deliver envelop from China at 75c cost, its likely someone else is paying for your 75c envelops (like taxpayers through subsidies).
I think that websites like Temu or AliExpress are particularly popular in poorer countries because we're used to scammy tactics, and we know how to navigate them. We know what to buy in order to get what we want, and for this purpose, AliExpress is awesome, because there are so many products you can't find locally. Meanwhile customers from rich countries expect better customer service as the default, and are willing to pay higher price for it.
It does not work. You have to declare the real source of the merchandise. Or it has to go through "substantial transformation" so that is called "Made in France".
Country of origin is taxed and not country of shippment.
Thank you for saving me money! I have been saving up for a little birthday gift for myself, which I was planning to get from Temu and the extra charge would make it way over my budget. Thanks again!
Why would you offer some low quality shit from Temu for a birthday? 99 items out of 100 self destruct within weeks of use.
It is only useful to people compulsively buying clothing regardless of the quality and who will never wear twice the same thing. Disposable stuff/waste.
One would only do that to their worst enemy.
OK I am exagerrating a bit and had a handful lf decent stuff from aliexpress/wish/temu. But you can typically only order for yourself as the quality testing is non existent. It is totally unsuitable for gifts. Mechanical pieces are often out of tolerance, clothing way uglier inperson than in photo, electronic stuff can last only days or years but you have no way to know for sure, finitions in general are very bad in general.
I've also been saving up for a self birthday gift from AliExpress, parts to build a custom watch. Looks like I missed my chance on that one too. Though if this trade war continues escalating I have a feeling a watch will be the least of my worries.
I used to buy a lot from Temu. Till I got a product that fell apart after three months. I tried to leave a bad review, but Temu wouldn't allow it. If you're trying to leave 3 star rating or below, they redirect you to customer service. But since customer service only dealt with items under 45 days (as far as I remember), they would just tell me something like "too bad, you're out of luck".
So I can't get a refund, I can't get a replacement, I can't leave bad review.
This was very eye-opening to me. I immediately uninstalled their stupid app.
Ebay do something similar too. You can immediately provide positive feedback, but you have to wait 7 days to add negative feedback. This is ostensibly to encourage sellers to address issues to retain reputation. Sellers can also get negative feedback removed after the fact by doing refunds, etc.
This means high volume low value sellers have little incentive to actually properly describe things or post correctly.
A common issue I keep seeing is sellers using slower postage than paid for. You can immediately see from the tracking number, even if you wait 7+ days to submit feedback, you'll get a 'sorry' refund and the feedback is somehow 'addressed' without them going back in time and delivering it faster.
Online reviews are just a sham now, Goodhart's law etc as even if the reviews aren't fake, they're encouraged or incentivised from real customers. Look up any service provider on TrustPilot and it's the same: hundreds of 5-star reviews from people told to add a review just after signing up, a dozen 1-star reviews from bad customer service, and barely anything in between.
Temu/Aliexpress/etc are for buying very cheap clothing. 2 out of 3 items fit and 1 out of 3 is decent quality. That's still cheaper, depending on what tariffs your country is charging.
I wouldn't buy something where a warranty would be useful from them.
Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.
For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.
I have a Magene p505 crank-based power meter - £250 delivered. It's as accurate as ones costing 4X as much, and has not shown any signs of issues in the year+ I've been using it.
The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies. For cycling, especially Carbon Fibre parts, this isn't surprising - the sheer depth and breadth of composites knowledge from years of making bikes for western brands has paid off handsomely.
AliExpress is great for electronics. Not the „I need a phone“ stuff (although for that it’s fine too, I think), but more the „I need an ESP-32 module“.
> Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.
I bought a bunch of parts for a racing drone from Aliexpress because I didn't expect a traditional retailer's warranty to really matter much. ("This frame has been in a crash. No warranty.") What's the point of paying extra in that scenario?
I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon in the past year and only one got rejected, and quickly approved I corrected one thing that was out of the rules.
More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
You really expect that kind of support from something ahipped across the globe for peanuts? Ali/Temu and the kind serve specific purposes and they do it well.
I find reviews on those sites still useful, and at least on Ali there are a fair number of negative ones as well. Users tell if a specific part works with Home Assistant or zigbee2mqt.
The "kind of support" they say they expect is the ability to leave a negative review. That doesn't seem too extreme of an expectation honestly. The only reason support came into the picture is that Temu redirected them to support.
The closest thing to Amazon made in Latin America is almost the same thing, I'm talking of course about Mercadolibre.com, you can ask a refund for a product but if you do you cannot leave a review at all, and the products with bad scores have their scores and their reviews hidden, that's why is impossible to find a single product with less than 4 stars, and they have millions of them, it's as shady as it gets.
Whats the goal here? Like, with amazon they don't own most of the products they sell, so presumably leaving a bad review doesn't bother amazon much, but what about temu?
We have gotten to the point where you can't leave a bad review on aggregation sellers (like Temu/Ali/Amazon) because if you could, your competitor will for sure buy some farm in Taiwan/wherever and destroy your reputation.
Shopee has even worse behavior around reviews. You can't even leave a review past the first few days, and they bribe you with shopee points to leave a review.
The result is people opening the box, going yep, it works, 5 stars, gimme those points.
If it breaks a week or so later? Too late! No way to give feedback.
Do you buy anything based on reviews there? They're obviously silly and exchanged for discounts and "coins" so I just ignore them in a way I don't elsewhere.
I quite like AE because you can avoid the app and returns on DOAs often just involve a refund without returning anything. There are silly annoyances, and sometimes buying locally is inexplicably cheaper, but for little electronics, they're hard to beat.
IMO Temu and Aliexpress/Alibaba market themselves in a very different way. In many ways I consider Aliexpress to be more reputable just because they don't try to pull the wool over your eyes with their products. With Temu they try to make it seem like the products are just as good as what you get at Walmart. With Aliexpress at least they just straight up tell you they are a "front" for all the factories in Shenzhen.
I found Aliexpress to be great for retro gaming consoles, for anyone interested and willing to wait, you can get an "R36S" which can play all the old gameboy games and other retro games for ~$30.
The other advantage with Alibaba is you can interact directly with the companies doing the manufacturing.
Several years ago, I was frustrated with the insane costs of hockey sticks. I'd been going through sticks at about a 6-8 month clip since high school and having to buy $300 hockey sticks every six months was not something I was happy about.
I got on Alibaba, sent out several emails saying I was an equipment manager for a US based hockey team. The team was looking to get some stock sticks for backups since players were going through sticks like crazy.
I emailed two companies who did carbon fiber manufacturing. One company made one-piece composite sticks that were blank. You could tell them what length, flex, lie and blade pattern you wanted and then if you wanted 12K or 14K carbon fibre. I got two 12K blanks. They were impressively durable and lasted for well over a year. Almost twice as long as my expensive retail sticks. They were a little more whippy than I was used to, but it was easy getting used to it.
The other company was a bit shady. The first email I got back was someone asking me how many top of the line Bauer sticks I needed. I asked him how that was possible and he just said he had access and just give him the specs and they'll send them out. I ordered two of those to boot thinking it was a pretty big gamble. Turns out they were legit. My buddies who used the same retail model couldn't tell the difference. We went over the graphics and couldn't see any difference either. Ironically, I still have one of these Bauer 1X Lite sticks that I use when I get down to a single stick and I'm waiting for the newer ones to ship.
Interestingly enough, by the time I had gone through three of the sticks, suddenly there were several companies popping up offering "blank" sticks for a fraction of the cost of the retail sticks. Effectively doing the same thing I did, but now as legit hockey companies trying to save players some money. All told, I think I spent around $500 for the 4 sticks I bought. A fraction of what retail sticks would've cost. I haven't gone back and ordered more sticks, just because there's so many pro stock stuff out there and so many other companies selling these blanks now.
Compared to everything else it feels pretty minor but I'm fairly worried about the handheld retro gaming market. I really enjoy it as a hobby but it seems like almost all of those devices will no longer be profitable / worth buying if the tariffs are enforced on them.
I've been really enjoying my recent Anbernic RG 406V and it can play pretty much all the systems I want it to so I guess I'll just stick to that if the handheld market collapses.
There's a different cost vs. shipping tradeoff between the two. I use Temu for little electronic things (OLED panels with breakout header pins, microcontroller boards, breadboards, etc). For that purpose, Temu's prices are much better than any domestic seller, for a product that is exactly the same for my purposes. And, unlike Aliexpress, it won't take a fiscal quarter for your stuff to arrive.
I have ordered loads of stuff off Aliexpress, in the exact category you described. Never taken more than ~1 week to reach. Aliexpress shipping is actually quicker than Amazon if you don't have Prime.
Part of my AliExpress purchasing workflow is checking reviews for the item I'm about to buy on Amazon, as they're (usually) higher quality than the "just received item, 5 stars" reviews on AliExpress.
The idea that Temu is gonna end is nonsense. First of all, the US is just one market for them. They're red hot in many countries in latin America, Asia, Africa and so many others. Moreover, I guess they'll eventually find other ways to sell products in the USA, in one way or another.
Temu vs. AliExpress is usually a shipment speed vs. cost tradeoff. Their catalogues also differ quite a bit in some areas, so sometimes one has to use one or the other.
I feel like AliExpress has improved in this area though, likely due to pressure from Temu.
A few months ago, I had an AliExpress order beat an Amazon order to my house. I wasn't using Prime, but the AliExpress order did ship from China. It took about a week.
I've had so much good luck with AliExpress. I wouldn't order anything I might need to return. But I've never received something that needed that. I can't begin to describe how disappointing these tariffs are going to be for me. It's not as if I can or ever will be able to buy these things locally.
Whoever's doing the "design" on Temu and Ali seems to think all Americans want to feel like they're in Vegas while shopping. It's very obnoxious, to the point that people have created plug-ins to clean things up (e.g. AliTools Shopping Assistant, AliRadar).
Aren't Temu/Shein considered to be ultra-low-quality garbage, mostly? Don't people haul their items in order to promote their useless Instagram/TikTok, so their followers will buy the same ultra-low-quality garbage?
Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of direct access to overseas markets, rather than local distributors slapping 200% margin on Chinese sourced/produced items that you can buy from AliExpress. But I'm not in favor of flooding the market with cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap that ends up in landfill in a few weeks or days.
I don't get this argument. All the cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap will still exist, it's just going to be sold on Amazon with 1-day shipping. Consumers want these products and the market just fills the demand. The deregulation that will take place under this administration will lead to even more, toxic, unsafe crap flooding the market, except it'll just be manufactured in the U.S.
The same item on Amazon will cost x2/3 times than Temu, if you will be able to find the same item at all, meaning it cuts a big chunk of the potential buyers of the cheap crap.
The world would have been a better place if we hadn't been allowed to flood the market with cheap crap. Not only it creates enormous waste, it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name crap.
No idea about Temu, but I've been told that some clothes from Shein are better and cheaper than what we sometimes find in the cheaper local stores (UK).
I hope temu and the other Chinese companies in that segment stop selling overseas. Their model is just incredibly destructive to the environment, they ship over the lowest quality garbage imaginable and create so much pollution and waste in the process.
I also have quite a bit of disdain for people using these sites. Nobody needs this and it is just harmful all around.
You will find the exact same items on Amazon, except usually more expensive.
There are many items sold on Aliexpress that are of decent quality.
I think the point is to buy what you really need, and focus on quality, rather than impulse buying cheap stuff that ends up in the garbage after a month.
Our consumerism is hooked onto cheap crap, the factories producing it are only fulfilling the demand.
It's just a natural byproduct of poverty and a shrinking middle class in the United States. HN readers are not the target customers of Temu. It's those people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and can't afford quality goods whatsoever. It's the same as the low quality garbage found in predatory dollar stores in poor neighborhoods.
I did an experiment for my blog awhile back that never got written up (lack of time, mostly), but it is was just me ordering about $30US of stuff from Temu to see why they were so aggressively marketing themselves, the app auto-installing on my Samsung smartphone I have for work, etc.
The experience left me feeling very, very dirty.
The items in question were some small fire sticks for camping, a couple of solar portable power banks, and two small canvas backpacks. Each arrived in separate packages on different days, all shipped from what appeared to be the same CA facility, so right off the bat, we're two strikes against environmental friendliness.
The items were, as you'd expect, utter trash.
- Fire Sicks: these are those magnesium bars shaped like a little key that you strike with a piece of metal to create a spark, this allowing you to maybe start a fire. Now, I've been starting camp fires without flame for most of my life (probably the only thing I took away from my time in the Boy Scouts), so I've seen plenty of junk products that claim to do the same, but these take the cake. The actual "magnesium" bar was coated in a thick black paint for some reason? And the striking tool is a flimsy piece of aluminum coated in orange paint. Useless. I had to use a bit of sandpaper to remove the paint, giving access to the metal parts of both tools, and even then, the spark created was barely hot enough to catch a pile of dead leaves on fire. I don't know what they actually used to make these, but don't assume they will save your butt in a survival situation
- "Solar" Battery Bank: these are just regular USB power banks with a an extremely inefficient photovoltaic panel glued on. It is only capable of powering the green "charging" LED but definitely does not recharge the power bank itself. After I discharged them to see how long it would take to recharge with the solar panel, they sat in direct sunlight for 3 full days before I gave up with no additional power stored. However, they're not a total loss. They still work as you'd expect a regular USB power bank would, rechargeable with a typical micro-USB cord with two outputs to charge your devices. Didn't notice any weird voltages when charging my stuff, either. At the very least, they will not end up in a landfill because I can make use of them on camping trips.
- Canvas Backpack: the stitching is a joke, so don't expect to put anything heavy in these. My wife sews as a hobby, ended up deconstructing them and reinforcing them with some proper canvas material that made them way more rugged and able to hold gear (I use one for fishing magnet crap and the other for rock-hounding tools) but we could not help but wonder just how little the workers were paid to paid these garbage bags and what those conditions are like.
Their business model is built entirely on selling you garbage you do not need that will likely just be thrown away after a few (if any) uses unless you are more diy, willing to try to find ways to make things work or repurpose them. The entire shopping experience is gamified with spinning wheels and lightning deals, coupons falling from the sky, etc, to the point where it was ridiculous and intrusively preventing from searching for things I wanted to order. It felt like their target audience was the old ladies I see spending 8 hours a day glue to the chair of a slot machine in the local casinos. It was so absurd I felt like was in a cartoon about consumerism and actually experienced guilt for having conducted the experiment.
I personally am always weary of cheap power banks. Given the rest of the corners cut on the device, how sure are you that the circuitry and the batteries themselves are of acceptable safety standards.
Even the batteries in expensive devices can become dangerous and I would assume that those undergo some higher leven of QA, testing and safety standards.
I understand it was an experiment but camping supplies are the very last thing I’d order from a site whose entire purpose is to peddle low quality garbage.
> create so much pollution and waste in the process
Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
The only exception is something where the only purpose is to be environmentally good (maybe planting some trees, maybe something that reduces energy usage).
Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
>Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
No, it depends on what you do with that income.
>Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
Plainly false. E.g. more expensive things made of natural materials and lasting for a long time create much less landfill than products which are cheap but last only a short time.
I own expensive shelfs which my parent bought for me as a child decades ago. They are literally "as good as new", much of the IKEA furniture I had to replace. Clearly the IKEA furniture had a bigger impact, although it was "cheaper".
>Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
All complaining I do is pointless. Obviously no institution who could force change is making decisions based on my HN posts.
Interesting dynamic here with echoes of the .com bubble where there is a huge web of industries all dependent on the current setup continuing and money being available for consumer spending and ads - when that dries up it will impact not just those selling goods imported from China, but everyone in the US.
Disrupting US trade quickly with massive global tariffs will cause all sorts of secondary effects like a massive downturn in ad spending - directly affecting companies like Meta and Google who look insulated right now because they don't sell physical products.
Good riddance. I'd rather have fewer things I care more about. If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier, need less space and spend less money even at higher prices. And when we do need to buy things, we'll be either supporting local workers or friendly nations.
> If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier, need less space and spend less money even at higher prices.
I can't believe how many people are trying to put a positive spin on the government imposing massive taxation on people's right to buy things from other countries.
It's easy to sneer at junk fashion from Temu or whatever, but access to cheap tools and parts was the lifeblood of hobbyists and experimenters across the country.
It's not just cheap clothes from Temu. This administration just took away your right to buy anything cheaply internationally. That's not a good thing.
I think two things can be true at the same time: these taxes are ridiculous, and ordering a 75-cents part from the other side of the planet is a massive waste of resources.
So destroying the economy is worth making a few people feel better about minimizing their life? Because that's what is happening. How about people exercise some common sense and not buy things they don't need as opposed to millions of people becoming homeless and military aggression between the USA and China getting much more likely
Some people may feel that their economy was already destroyed when manufacturing was moved to China. Ever drive around Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, etc? So many dead towns, thanks to jobs moving elsewhere.
I think ending the pipeline of landfill fodder from Temu is a great thing. That kind of consumerism is like eating a diet of pure sugar. Feels good for a second, but bad for the consumer, environment and economy.
So throwing society into chaos with a sudden opium ban is worth making a few self righteous officials feel better about controlling everyone's lives? Because that's what this crackdown is bringing. How about people exercise some willpower and moderation with the pipe, instead of driving the entire opium trade underground, creating violence between smugglers, ruining the livelihoods of countless ordinary people caught in the middle, and practically begging the Western powers to escalate their military actions against us when their precious trade is disrupted?
I doubt anyone is seriously arguing the tariffs as implemented are the solution.
On the other hand, if you're thinking all opposition to the tariffs need to agree then you're deluding yourself (not trying to be antagonistic here, but it's dangerous to be blind to alternatives.)
For instance, a smaller tariff on completed Luxury goods and a removal of the Temu exception could've easily been the play and potentially could've been done without much fanfare (by someone who wasn't Trump obviously)
> If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier
If we wished upon a star that humans were better a lot of problems would go away. In the real world, poor people will make do and those with resources will buy smuggled goods. I’m already diverting a spring skiing trip to Canada because it’s cheaper to buy kit there than here.
This is what will happen, it's why Americans and American got into the cheaper, Chinese made goods thing in the first place, there was a LOT of demand for cheaper stuff.
People will just do less, become more poor and have less opportunities or work around the system by smuggling things from Canada or something.
Good for you, but it's not all about rabid consumption. My girlfriend has been into jewelry making and ordered a lot of stuff off temu, which she gave away the end product to friends and family. That'll most likely be prohibitively expensive at this point
Temu has notoriously low standards when it comes to jewelry and other jewelry related items. Reddit threads are full of horror stories about toxic materials being used for these items. Be careful what you give out to friends and family.
For many products, domestically manufactured substitutes still have some inputs that come from international suppliers.
Could be some raw materials, the machines that make it, or the packaging. Now everything is going to be massively more expensive and it's going to have impacts even on domestically manufactured goods.
There's also the substitution effect, where heavy tariffs on one thing will increase demand on substitutes and therefore raise their prices.
It's really bad policy all around. Nobody who has any familiarity with manufacturing thinks it's going to encourage more domestic manufacturing because the tariffs suddenly restricted your ability to buy inputs and machines at reasonable prices. You're better off building a factory in another country to service global demand.
Tariffs lower the quality and increase the prices of domestic substitutes. There is no competition. Tariffs are how business is done in third-world countries like India. Production of everything is banned/controlled, except for the few buddies of the government in power.
Either you will pay more for domestic producers or (more likely) you will not pay at all since either domestic production will not ramp up for niche things, or you will not be willing to pay hikes domestic prices for the same utility.
This isn’t true, because the subsidized stuff from China drove medium-quality choices out of the market.
Try to buy some nicer jeans or T-shirts. The choices are stuff made as cheaply as possible, brand name stuff made as cheaply as possible but marked up like it isn’t, and actual quality clothes at 15x the price of the cheapest stuff. Most of the US clothing manufacturers have pivoted to the high-end just to survive or moved production overseas and are coasting along on their brand reputation.
Well, from outside it seems that the list of friendly nations keep getting smaller and smaller… and good luck replacing the vast majority of your supply chain with local workers. Just look where all the products you currently have were made.
Ads was THE thing that our tech industry was exporting to the world. I was astonished with the people who thought that tech would be not affected by the tariffs.
The world is still consuming. Even if the US tariffs everyone else, they still trade amongst themselves. The real risk to our economy is that the rest of the world stops paying for our services and cultural exports.
I'm relatively happy whenever I see negative news about Temu. Call it a bias, though my limited data[0] (itself biased) supports whatever negative perceptions I have towards Temu. The only brand to get 0/100? Why does human exploitation always have to pair with the absolute cheapest prices sourced from developing countries?
I first learned about Temu when someone I barely knew messaged me saying they needed me to sign up to Temu under some referral code so they could get bonus points to shop more. They were addicted to shopping, and Temu was the most addictive thing on the internet. Like the Dollar Store, Amazon, slots, and a pyramid scheme, rolled into one.
App store ranking is based on installs. Ads drive people to install the app. Less ads -> less installs -> lower ranking. Seems like a logical consequence.
I don't know about quid pro quo but those ads are content on the internet so I would assume that would drop SEO and new installs.
One of the strange patterns with Google is that quid pro quo is hard to even filter out as in some cases it is actually a natural part of the system. Probably a bad thing.
Could the two have a common cause? What if Temu stopped buying ads and consumers stopped installing the Temu app for one and the same reason, namely that trade barriers are being erected that will make Temu unpalatable for many users, something widely publicized and known both to Temu and consumers?
Yes. Your spending is a far more powerful vote than any democratic process. Your society is what it spends on. A society addicted to cheap trash is going to be precisely that.
These 'dollar stores' are wealth extraction centres, which don't really provide anything to society other than enriching a dropshipping middle class and foreign exploitative factory owner class. There's very little value being created.
I'd far rather support places where purchases have numerous positive externalities, whether it be from labour conditions to promoting curiosity, or from environmental impacts, to building local communities.
Society was doing quite ok until the greedy middleman classes decided to render the domestic working classes irrelevant for a little short-term profit, just so we can buy new LED lights, or change our t-shirt collection every week.
The dollar store moves into neighborhoods that are impoverished as part of their strategy, and push out family owned businesses and would be competition through extreme saturation.
Speaking of, anyone else has encountered issues while browsing temu? I'm facing captcha's most of the time. I mean the "slide to move piece into a position" which most of the times fails, after which I'm facing a more "difficult" pick object of color repeated etc. The site also after a while of browsing not logged in pushes me into login page. So I wonder if it's my browser and various adblocking extensions or it's a common thing?
Damn, I forgot about cross-domain tracking. I'm either browsing or shopping on every platform in private mode - perhaps that also rolls me onto... the great captcha wall.
This might more be a European thing, but over here some of the sellers on marketplaces like Amazon, are linked with organised VAT/Tax fraud.
While I can't say it's all, it'll all things being equal, be baked in to the competitive dynamics. Thus undercutting legal operators, or destroying their profit (incentive) to provide good or domestically produced wares.
There's a podcast episode from some ML (money laundering) specialists, that make mention of it. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/trigger-warning/id1448...
If you use the PPP adjusted per capita GDP as a comparison metric the US stands about 37% higher than the EU. Considering the baseline tariff of 10% and the substantially higher tariffs for important trading partners the US targets, it may actually even out.
They may not be toast, but I suspect there are many panicked planning meetings happening now. (Unless they were clever and had a plan ready for a while)
They did have a plan. Temu/Shein used to ship directly from China, handling the shipping themselves for the sellers on their platforms.
Since a year or two ago (or even earlier), they started accepting (and encouraging) sellers to handle the shipping themselves (while still maintaining a fast shipping time) by giving those sellers more traffic.
In order to have fast shipping time, it basically mean the sellers need to have warehouses (or 3rd party warehouses) in the USA. It's easier for the sellers to workaround the tariffs when they are shipping in bulk to the USA.
The prices will be higher for sure, but it will be a lot lower than people are expecting.
Not sure how well the plan will work. Just what I heard from people working in the industry.
Temu's whole grift was subsidized products and subsided shipping and both of those things are no longer available why would they continue to worry about the US?
I already buy a lot of clothes at least partially made in OECD states. Even with that “partially” doing a lot of work and my avoiding paying extra for “fancy” brand names… I don’t think Americans earning closer to median household income are gonna be happy about paying the kind of prices I pay.
the thing is that life is about freedom of choice, I didn't buy they cheap junk, I'm fairly normal. I might be the occasional hobby board off alibaba express a couple times a year. Choice is good, not bad.
The market does what people want. Fast fashion is exactly what people want because fashion has always been changing fast and about the "new thing" and people like to be able to buy new stuff all the time.
Well, given how many of their products come from China, right? How many of the products on sale on Amazon are partly or entirely produced in China? Those will have 125% (145? How mush is it today?) import duty on them, unless they're electronics.
I'm surprised the Chinese sellers are able to compete for fast fashion. Clothes are the one thing I don't really buy online because getting sizing right is already hard even when you're not dealing with Temu-style "well actually we said there's a +- 25 tolerance in the fine print and this is within tolerance" bullshit.
AliExpress is indispensable for small technical items. If they're available locally at all, shipping included they'd often cost 10-20x as much.
I wonder if we can look forward to the end of the letter soup brands on Amazon, it's ridiculously difficult finding real brands in between them.
That would be one silver lining in all this mess, at least.
It's easy to find "real brands" if one looks outside of Amazon, Alibaba, etc.
Surprisingly, I find I am more pleased with purchases I make outside of Amazon despite all of Amazon's perks. "Platforms" like Amazon and fake "brands" aside, online retailers that only sell "real brands" are still around; they never disappeared despite Amazon's meteoric rise. Many sell through Amazon but also sell outside Amazon, too. Some do not sell through Amazon.
Being born before the internet existed, I started ordering products delivered by mail in the catalog era. I am biased toward locating "real brands" that have built reputations for high quality. I miss these brands. I loved the transition from catalogs to websites, but it seems like in the last 10-15 years fake "brands" that can offer no promises whatsoever have been killing off the motivation for having real ones that guarantee high quality.
When I went to Shenzhen I found some of these brands with stalls in their vast malls. They're real places. As you walk through you navigate around an obstacle course of dollies, hear endless packing tape and occasionally point out, "oh look, there's Owawuwo, I got a cheap projector from them".
Americans can get a Shenzhen-only 5-day Visa on arrival (VOA) from Hong Kong through the Luohu entry at the LoWu station via the regular MTR. Don't take the HSR, they do not offer it there and you will be turned away. You Must go to the office at Louhu station, it is the only way. It's easy, just take the metro.
Anyways, at LoWu it takes about 45 minutes after doing the paper work. It was very easy. Visa approval for Americans this exact way is estimated to be north of 98%. Exchange your HKD at the government run forex up stairs in the mall after entering China, it's a 1.5% commission, best I've ever seen. Then pay in cash - your Western credit cards Will Not Work. It is a fairly easy day trip - about 45min from Kowloon by rail. The 5-day Visa is a Single Entry.
To go to the trading district take Luobao line (#1) to Huaqianglu (3 stops). It's a 10 minute train trip or a fairly uneventful hour walk if you're up to it. English at the trading district and the border mall is ok. Everywhere else, not so much.
Recommended. The place is absolutely bonkers.
They have this wildly intricate culture of price bargaining. If you're looking to actually buy stuff, you can get amazing deals. But I just went as a tourist.
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> It's easy to find "real brands" if one looks outside of Amazon, Alibaba, etc.
You have to be careful, though. There are a shocking number of legit-looking brands with their own sites that are just drop-shipping the same stuff, at an enormous markup. My wife found a piece of clothing she liked for $60; a quick image search found it (with the exact same images) for $8 on Shein. Nice hustle, if you can make it work.
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I've found I buy fewer things in general, and also the things I do buy are of higher quality when I do it in person. Might even get some useful advice if it's something like a tool. Also it's just more fun, especially if it's a nice bike ride, walk, or trip on transit.
> And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut
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This is why I have a bunch of stock in Shopify. It's slowly started rolling out discovery features in its Shop app that federates its stores. I try to limit my use on Amazon to things I know can't be faked and things that are so much cheaper that I can deal with it being fake. My purchasing trends have definitely moved toward the edges - aliexpress for chinese stuff (that would normally be on Amazon) and Shopify for "buy it for life" stuff.
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I hate the letter soup brands but also not willing to pay $200 for an LL Bean branded windbreaker or such.
Maybe just spoiled from the early days of Walmart and now Amazon.
I'm going to genuinely miss the bicycle headlight I have bought under like 4 different brand names. I won't miss the 36 other grotesqueries sold as alternatives and produced by the same business and manufacturing environment, but I'm also not excited about having to choose between 6 $50 lights of similar quality that are locked to a GPS company's equipment. It would be great if in 10 years I could get a similar light for 25% more than the current price adjusted for future inflation. But there's no reason to believe that tariffs are going to make American products better, just that it makes the cheap products American. And there's nothing else about Trump's (or for that matter his Democratic counterparts'-) industrial policy to encourage that either.
That’s a lot more true in USA than Canada. Probably the case in other places too.
15 different variants of the same product, all obviously cheaply made from the same factory, with varying degrees of quality control and reviews strewn about the various “brands” of the product so that it’s much harder to have a negative review everywhere.
Yeah, this sucks. Though the correct thing to do here is to enforce this hygiene on the platforms themselves. They have every resource and means to be able to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It’s just more profitable for them not to
There are flecks of gold in the midst of all that dirt.
I needed to make a 3/4" hole in a 1/8" thick mild steel angle to repair a cart. Didn't have a drill bit that size and quickly realized that a hole saw would be a better choice. Off to Amazon. After some browsing, found the same 3/4" carbide-tipped holesaw from a million resellers. Found a package of two for $13. Following the logic of "even if they only last for one hole, it's still cheaper than buying a good drill bit that I'll never use again", I ordered it. Item arrived and it looked as cheaply made as the photo!
But what do I have to lose? For $13, it's worth a shot.
Chucked up the holesaw, dripped some cutting oil on the metal and went to work. Fricking thing went through the steel like it wasn't even there. I was fully expecting that the teeth would chip off and go flying about halfway through, or it wouldn't do crap and the metal would work-harden, making my job even harder or worst case, the entire flimsy-looking thing would shatter (I have excellent safety glasses BTW). No, about 1 minute later I had a nice clean 3/4" hole with perfect edges that didn't even need deburring.
That led to the first Amazon review that I ever wrote: I was that shocked at how well it performed. Turned on my (Amazon-bought) stick welder and finished the repair.
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I ended up drastically cutting back on Amazon purchases when they started getting flooded with brands like that.
Its absolutely on Amazon to maintain quality. There are certain brands and types of products I'll order there because they're just harder to find otherwise, but its mostly a last resort these days given that Amazon doesn't care to curate what is on their "shelves".
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Yeah, and it's not even necessarily a problem with the product itself. Sometimes I do want something cheap and disposable. The problem is that you have roughly zero information about the retailer, and manufacturer, and anyone in between. If one product listing gets bad reviews, someone can spin up 5 more listings with slightly different metadata. It's effectively a Sybil attack against the reputation system of the market.
It's all just the same crap you'd find sold by a "proper" retailer. Where do you think they get their stuff from?
I'll gladly take the cheaper alternatives instead of being charged 2 or 3 times the amount I'd pay if I import it myself.
All of them made out of balsa wood yet have 10,000 5-star reviews. It’s a joke
> I was very pleased with my "[brand name, if applicable] toilet seat, (2-pack), premium pure white, toolless installation", that I purchased for my family. Would definitely recommend it to friends and family. It arrived promptly and was in perfect condition. You exceeded your current quota please check your plan and billing details.
The above is similar to recent reviews I've seen.
It's infuriating that there is a reliance on user reporting to find and report COMPLETELY OBVIOUS fake reviews on Amazon. A great example of why competition is necessary, and not just from one other entity equally interested in allowing the others existing to avoid being a "monopoly"
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“I bought this product for my husband and he loves it.”
My favorite is all these letter-soup Firewire-to-USB convertors which are just glue and random wires inside and are either completely inert or disastrously damaging to your peripherals:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=firewire+to+usb+adapter
It's fascinating to me that every letter-soup brand is competing on a product that is literally fraud.
I literally got a Firewire to USB converter yesterday to try and pull video off a DV Camcorder. A video capture card in the same price range had worked great for letting me stream VHS tapes through OBS Studio.
There are various YouTube videos showing a daisy chain of Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 1/2 adapters connected to various Firewire cables and adapters. I was hoping to avoid all of that but the camera doesn't show at all. Fortunately, nothing seems damaged on either side.
I've only got 6 tapes so I'm sending them off to a service and sending the adapter back to Amazon.
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You may get rid of that, but it's still Amazon. Just recently, they fuzzed all their search results further, so when you search for something, it will give you lots of stuff you didn't search for. Similar to how Facebook Marketplace does.
I think the only way to avoid disappointment is to avoid Amazon altogether. Their customer experience is extremely deceptive and engineered to make you spend the most money. From the featured searches all the way to how it charges you paid shipping instead of free at checkout.
We should all feel burned enough at this point and stop rewarding them. Bezos purchased the Washington Post for all this money, and he won't stop there.
From your lips to Jassy's ears
Yeah. I just go to Best Buy. You pay more. Their website works pretty well.
Worth mentioning though, that BestBuy's website also has the same garbage "marketplace" problem as Amazon
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I mean maybe, but the product will still be made in china.
What’s worse, many real brands you recognize sold off their brand name a while ago so you’re not even getting the product quality you might expect.
The article is about Temu. Amazon is not mentioned.
Maybe you should read the article before commenting? Section:"Why we care"
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it's the whole point of the tariffs. China does an end run around all of our laws, consumer safety, human rights, workers conditions, intellectual property, all that, and in doing so they cut costs and beat domestic companies at the market. Tariffs are a tax we charge to represent those things they have immorally refused to do while participating in our market.
A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
What zamalek describes isn't just that China manufactures cheap products. The complain is more about retailers or marketplaces (particularly online ones) that encourage essentially anonymous, zero-cost seller accounts and product listings.
Traditional retailers like Target or Costco also sell a lot of cheap Chinese stuff, but they don't have quite the same level of junk in their listings.
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Do you mean this is the point of a carefully planned, deliberated, executed, and announced tariff rollout, or do you mean that's the whole point of tariffs as they are currently being implemented in the United States?
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> A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
Australia (I live there) has free trade, a high minimum wage (USD$16/hr) which is strictly enforced, no tariffs to speak of, and used to share the same values as the USA (in the last 100 days no so much). Australia has been that way for decades. In other words: your wrong, despite what "common sense" might tell you.
There are far more glaring examples, like Singapore. Almost no natural resources to exploit, no tariffs to speak of, and a median yearly income of USD$66,000. The USA's median income is USD$40,000.
Now look at countries with high tariffs, or even just "higher than the USA used to have" tariffs. All of them, and I do mean off of them, including China, have living standards well below those with very low tariffs. So you are not just wrong. Empirical evidence says you have it completely arse about.
after 50 years of de-industrialization in US, it's a sad fact that US can no longer produce most of those items, yes it's totally gone. It will take a few decades to rebuild, if possible at all. For now, whatever those junks are at Amazon, there are not many options to procure them elsewhere.
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I can see how hitting the EU with tariffs is going to improve human rights ... oh wait.
But on a more serious note, tariffs could have been used for what you are saying, and it would have been a beautiful thing, but I think we can agree that's not what's happening here, can't we?
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The whole point of the tariffs is to cause chaos and if you think they have an actual plan boy do I have a bridge to sell you
I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years. Mostly little electronics parts and specialized tools for my workshop. Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much. Obviously it's over now. Anyone getting a package in May will be hit with a $75-$150 or more bill per package, even a 75 cent envelope will be charged +$75. I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering. I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet. I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks.
> I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years.
> I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering.
I personally feel bad for the environment and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production. Good if the beneficiaries are gone from your part of the world.
I've been short on work, which means I've been poor. I use my off time to work on side projects that I simply could not afford to complete if I paid what US companies charge for tools, components, and custom PCBs. My ability to innovate is seriously impacted by these tarrifs and there is no alternative that I can afford.
I recently created something that people in my industry actually want to buy, but I only ordered enough parts for 5 units. I had priced them so that when I sold them, I'd be able to put larger orders in to begin getting quantity discounts. Only problem is, what was going to be a $2k order will now cost roughly $5k, and guess what? I didn't charge $1k apiece. Now I'm out of stock and stuck in limbo waiting to earn cash from my regular job and see how these tarrifs shake out.
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> I personally feel bad for the environment
1 item per day is certainly not efficient, but nowadays temu and aliexpress batch things over a small period so that shouldn't really happen...
> and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production
Remember that taking away bad jobs does not save anyone, quite the contrary. People go from having shit jobs to no jobs, or even worse jobs with lower-profile companies.
Helping them requires creating vast numbers of better paying jobs with better working condition in their country, which require redirecting vast amounts of money to those countries. E.g., by buying even more stuff from those regions, but from manufacturers paying better wages (and selling goods more expensively), so they end up having to massively expand and hire more.
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I fully agree on the environmental part. Shipping all this stuff individually is incredibly wasteful. Even the combined packages from AliExpress someone else mentioned this is the case, since there's a ton of unnecessary packaging wasting space and resources.
On the 'losing side' part I agree a lot less. In the recent past, most of these items would be sold by mega corps, marked up multiple times with most of the profits flowing into shareholder's pockets. Meanwhile, the average consumer is over paying for the exact same 'low quality junk' with branding like Logitech, Dell or Amazon Basics on it. Now we can get the same (or often better) quality straight from the source, often for a fraction of the price. To me, that's a big win.
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You remind me of Chamath Palihapitiya. He's this billionaire who likes to call things "cheap low quality junk" too, but for him it's anything is under like $5000, or not made in Milan or the French riviera. He's hamming it up for the audience but the point is the same. Every strata of wealth has the luxury of not buying the "cheap low quality junk" of the strata below it. To you, they are temu possessions, but to another person they are just their possessions. Everyone would love to be wealthy enough to never check a pricetag. And even then, plenty of products last just as long no matter what you spend on them. Many things are literally identical and just marked up 10x by the middleman who imported it to your local store.
Those people are not helped by loosing customers and there is no plan to help them.
They would be helped by better job opportunities where they live, by more governmental protections for workers where they live etc.
But, someone buying stuff made by their employer is not what harms them.
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Environment protection in the EU
good:
- replace plastic straws/cups with paper based ones
questionable:
- limit nicotine products to 10ml, so now instead of buying one bottle (200ml for example) of nicotine you have to buy 20 bottles 10ml each - ???
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> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet.
Well, why would you waste the opportunity to enrage Americans against their government, for free? "Your $5 package has arrived on time, now you only have to pay the $75 extra that the candidate you voted for has decided to take from you". It's the best ads campaign ever, and it's entirely free.
It's not that complicated.
They don't pay the tariffs. The person receiving the package does. Many carriers will slap you with the tariff charge, a brokerage fee, and then send you to collections if you don't pay it.
The vendors don't care because they're making the sale and the tariffs are the other person's responsibility. Caveat emptor.
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That's not what happens. You see the price tag, you just don't buy it, is what happens.
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Much like brexit this will be a case of hindsight for many - people realising too late that they voted against their own interests
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Brexit literally just resulted in the UK having lower tariffs and a probable free trade deal with the largest economy on the planet.
...unlike our friends on the European continent.
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Wait why would $0.75 have a $75 charge? Is there a minimum tariff that’s not as widely reported reported on? That would be a 10000% tariff. Or is this just exaggeration
There's a minimum charge, as well a percentage.
> Washington will also increase the per postal item fee on goods entering after May 2 and before June 1 to $100 from the planned $75. Parcels entering after June 1 will pay a fee of $200 per item instead of $150 announced previously, according to the Wednesday order.
ref. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-10/trump-aga...
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In Denmark imports have to pay vat (25%), regardless of tariffs (goods made in Denmark also charge vat).
But the processing fee for customs is usually 20-40 USD. Which can exceed the cost of the package in the first place.
So when possible I always shop within the EU, or maybe the US.
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I think the issue is related to postal charges, and the reduction (or elimination?) of the "de minimis" exemption plus the tarrifs.
One positive that could still come out of the tariffs is the US consuming less junk.
I just spent a few months in Germany, and the trash can for our APARTMENT BUILDING is roughly half of the size of the one at my single family home in the US. And here I see lots of my neighbors overflowing their 96 gallon wheeled tote very week. The world would be much better off with out all of this waste.
Germany is definitely top-tier on reducing waste. Before I left the UK it had got to the point where actual landfill-bound unrecyclable trash was a tiny portion of the waste output.
The sad thing is, UK and Germany are tiny compared to all the other countries that don't give a shit.
I live in Germany. One reason the toters can be smaller is because there places to dispose of your recyclable goods (free) on almost every corner. The toters are just for compost and regular trash.
Aliexpress my impression is you can get "useful" stuff that are odd but usable. But I've had the impression that temu and shein was all "direct to garbage" devices, was this not the case?
They sell the same stuff in my experience. I would describe Temu as selling the top 10% of AliExpress that's the most popular, with faster and more reliable shipping since they use huge centralized fulfillment warehouses, similar to Amazon warehouses.
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I've only used Temu a few times, but in my limited experience it is just Aliexpress but with a slick gamified interface on top. Alibaba sellers supplies the same stuff to Aliexpress, Temu, a ton of the Instagram ads and even a lot of the cheap Amazon stuff.
They are all different frontends for the same backend - amazon is also a frontend to the same thing but with prices 2-3x'd.
You can't lump shein and temu in the same bucket. My wife is an avid shein user and from what I can tell the quality so far is really good for what you pay.
Shein is in reality just an aliexpress/baba wrapper, but they put huge amounts of effort into accurate sizing charts for their clothing, and their customer reviews system actively incentivises buyers to upload pictures of themselves wearing the purchased clothing. So as a potential buyer you can actually see the piece of clothing being worn by someone with a similar body shape than your own.
My impression of temu is they are trying to be as misleading as possible with their listings, and the value for money is absolutely terrible because of that: you think you are getting a 6' xmas tree for $20, but when it arrives it's 6".
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I'm sorry for your convenience loss, but I'm happy for the environment.
Not only because of the unrestricted consumerism, but also because of the environmental costs of logistics. I too have ordered fusible resistors from aliexpress that I could not find locally.
But things I barely need, only for a small dopamine kick ? I do my best to not have a small baggie shipped from the other side of the planet for that.
And not even mentioning the effects of insatiability on myself.
The resistors to your local store have to go through logistics as well. And doing the last mile yourself is a lot more inefficient than a post service doing it.
Transport is also quite small fraction of most products' environmental costs.
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Who would have thought that Trump would bring in a policy that would benefit the environment? Also, who would have guessed that right wing governments would start buying Tesla's? Quite a plot twist ..
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I bought a bunch of off-brand Lego kits usually with Chinese themes (pagodas, nine-tailed foxes) from Temu. What I thought was hilarious about Temu was that the size of things was usually different from you had in mind. Most of the time Temu items were smaller than I imagined but once in a while you'd get something much bigger.
>Anyone getting a package in May will be hit with a $75-$150 or more bill per package
Not "anyone"; only the 4% of humanity that lives in the USA.
~20% of AliExpress and Temu packages is probably the more pertinent number.
> Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much.
Most things I have bought on Ali express have no US source. I also have mostly bought small electronics and components and generally pay the Amazon premium for speed and only go to Ali express when I can’t find what I need, so third is quite a bummer to hear as I’d simply have no source for that item. Although, it did seem too good to be true, the minimal shipping costs that is.
Are you saying a consumer will pay $75 later if they order a package from China now and it comes in May?
There is a minimum fee for packages, yes. At this point I've lost track of all the changes but at one point I remember seeing $100 or $150 per package under some conditions.
Carriers will also charge a fee for brokering it. USPS has a $9 fee, other carriers are higher.
We went from being free to order things internationally to having out of control fees and taxes on top of everything.
There's a lot of sneering at Temu and Shein, but the hobbyist and electronics worlds are about to get hit extremely hard by the lack of access to tools and parts from Aliexpress. It's really sad.
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It doesn't matter when it was ordered, only when it goes through customs.
After the inavsion of Ukraine and sanctions were put on Russia every western company laundered their goods through Kazakhstan and into Russia. Im sure we will see a similar situation whith chinese goods finding their way into the country via vietnam.
> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet
Some people are reporting seeing tiktoks - not "ads", but regular videos, inasmuch as there's a difference - where Chinese vendors are saying "see, this is the factory that makes US brands such as lululemon, why not cut out the middleman and buy direct?"
> I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks
There's been several reversals already. If trade policy is done by whim, why not wait for a reversal as soon as it starts to bite?
The whole category of "US business dependent on Chinese imports for inputs" is probably toast in the meantime. This includes a lot of kickstarters.
White label goods.
My dad was in manufacturing and later importing so growing up I got to learn a lot about the process. He had worked for Heinz when I was young and would always buy the ketchup from some store brands that was about 60% of the cost. He was like, yea we bottle this on the same line as the name brand product.
The same hold true for imports. And yea there is a lot of cheap Chinese junk, but if you know what you're looking for you can find the same Chinese products that get name branded and marked up 200-2000% here in the US.
The problem with all of these is it's just going to cause and economic downturn where people purchase less, but more US products aren't going to sell. They simply aren't built here, and even if they are they'd still be many times more expensive. Even with the tariffs it would still be cheaper from China.
realistically speaking, it is likely not possible to deliver envelop from China at 75c cost, its likely someone else is paying for your 75c envelops (like taxpayers through subsidies).
You've been downvoted, but you are 100% correct. It is the result of the UPU treaty: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/10/us-withdrawing-144-y...
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What a great day to be European.
I think that websites like Temu or AliExpress are particularly popular in poorer countries because we're used to scammy tactics, and we know how to navigate them. We know what to buy in order to get what we want, and for this purpose, AliExpress is awesome, because there are so many products you can't find locally. Meanwhile customers from rich countries expect better customer service as the default, and are willing to pay higher price for it.
According to this report (https://www.earnestanalytics.com/insights/temu-growing-faste...), Temu is growing fastest among high income earners. Would be interesting from which countries most customers come from.
I'm in France, maybe I should open a proxy. You order through me, I reexpedite to the US, with a French stamp lol.
Somebody absolutely should and will open this business. Versions of it already exist in Northern Ireland after Brexit.
A slightly greyer version: you open the box, add a ribbon to every item, repackage it, mark it "final assembly in France".
Unfortunately for you, your business probably gets outcompeted by the guy who has the same idea in Canada.
It does not work. You have to declare the real source of the merchandise. Or it has to go through "substantial transformation" so that is called "Made in France".
Country of origin is taxed and not country of shippment.
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Russia has 0% tariffs, so they're probably going to ship through there.
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That’s already happening.
Thank you for saving me money! I have been saving up for a little birthday gift for myself, which I was planning to get from Temu and the extra charge would make it way over my budget. Thanks again!
Why would you offer some low quality shit from Temu for a birthday? 99 items out of 100 self destruct within weeks of use.
It is only useful to people compulsively buying clothing regardless of the quality and who will never wear twice the same thing. Disposable stuff/waste.
One would only do that to their worst enemy.
OK I am exagerrating a bit and had a handful lf decent stuff from aliexpress/wish/temu. But you can typically only order for yourself as the quality testing is non existent. It is totally unsuitable for gifts. Mechanical pieces are often out of tolerance, clothing way uglier inperson than in photo, electronic stuff can last only days or years but you have no way to know for sure, finitions in general are very bad in general.
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I've also been saving up for a self birthday gift from AliExpress, parts to build a custom watch. Looks like I missed my chance on that one too. Though if this trade war continues escalating I have a feeling a watch will be the least of my worries.
As long as they arrive before may 2nd.
I used to buy a lot from Temu. Till I got a product that fell apart after three months. I tried to leave a bad review, but Temu wouldn't allow it. If you're trying to leave 3 star rating or below, they redirect you to customer service. But since customer service only dealt with items under 45 days (as far as I remember), they would just tell me something like "too bad, you're out of luck".
So I can't get a refund, I can't get a replacement, I can't leave bad review.
This was very eye-opening to me. I immediately uninstalled their stupid app.
Ebay do something similar too. You can immediately provide positive feedback, but you have to wait 7 days to add negative feedback. This is ostensibly to encourage sellers to address issues to retain reputation. Sellers can also get negative feedback removed after the fact by doing refunds, etc.
This means high volume low value sellers have little incentive to actually properly describe things or post correctly. A common issue I keep seeing is sellers using slower postage than paid for. You can immediately see from the tracking number, even if you wait 7+ days to submit feedback, you'll get a 'sorry' refund and the feedback is somehow 'addressed' without them going back in time and delivering it faster.
Online reviews are just a sham now, Goodhart's law etc as even if the reviews aren't fake, they're encouraged or incentivised from real customers. Look up any service provider on TrustPilot and it's the same: hundreds of 5-star reviews from people told to add a review just after signing up, a dozen 1-star reviews from bad customer service, and barely anything in between.
Temu/Aliexpress/etc are for buying very cheap clothing. 2 out of 3 items fit and 1 out of 3 is decent quality. That's still cheaper, depending on what tariffs your country is charging.
I wouldn't buy something where a warranty would be useful from them.
Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.
Not entirely.
For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.
I have a Magene p505 crank-based power meter - £250 delivered. It's as accurate as ones costing 4X as much, and has not shown any signs of issues in the year+ I've been using it.
The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies. For cycling, especially Carbon Fibre parts, this isn't surprising - the sheer depth and breadth of composites knowledge from years of making bikes for western brands has paid off handsomely.
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AliExpress is great for electronics. Not the „I need a phone“ stuff (although for that it’s fine too, I think), but more the „I need an ESP-32 module“.
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> Temu/Aliexpress/etc are for buying very cheap clothing.
As long as you don't value safety.[1]
[1]: https://www.news.com.au/national/queensland/news/skin-melted...
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> Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.
I bought a bunch of parts for a racing drone from Aliexpress because I didn't expect a traditional retailer's warranty to really matter much. ("This frame has been in a crash. No warranty.") What's the point of paying extra in that scenario?
My experience (with Aliexpress) is that you usually get what you pay for.
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I had bad reviews been supressed by amazon several as well, so at this point I'm assuming any review system is theater.
Amazon definitely don't do anything like this.
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I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon in the past year and only one got rejected, and quickly approved I corrected one thing that was out of the rules.
More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
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You really expect that kind of support from something ahipped across the globe for peanuts? Ali/Temu and the kind serve specific purposes and they do it well.
I find reviews on those sites still useful, and at least on Ali there are a fair number of negative ones as well. Users tell if a specific part works with Home Assistant or zigbee2mqt.
I suggest to sort by order number and not stars.
The "kind of support" they say they expect is the ability to leave a negative review. That doesn't seem too extreme of an expectation honestly. The only reason support came into the picture is that Temu redirected them to support.
"That kind of support" is the absolute bare minimum. If you're not even providing that then you're not fit to sell anything, at any price.
But that is unfair competition against rule-abiding vendors. Platforms like Ali and Temu should face the most strict limitations for that alone.
The closest thing to Amazon made in Latin America is almost the same thing, I'm talking of course about Mercadolibre.com, you can ask a refund for a product but if you do you cannot leave a review at all, and the products with bad scores have their scores and their reviews hidden, that's why is impossible to find a single product with less than 4 stars, and they have millions of them, it's as shady as it gets.
Whats the goal here? Like, with amazon they don't own most of the products they sell, so presumably leaving a bad review doesn't bother amazon much, but what about temu?
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We have gotten to the point where you can't leave a bad review on aggregation sellers (like Temu/Ali/Amazon) because if you could, your competitor will for sure buy some farm in Taiwan/wherever and destroy your reputation.
In Brazil there's Shopee, which honestly, I find way better than Temu...
Shopee has even worse behavior around reviews. You can't even leave a review past the first few days, and they bribe you with shopee points to leave a review.
The result is people opening the box, going yep, it works, 5 stars, gimme those points.
If it breaks a week or so later? Too late! No way to give feedback.
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Aliexpress has the same problem, quite frustrating.
I can find some bad reviews on items that have a lot of positive reviews on Aliexpress. Seems like they don't completely filter all of them.
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Do you buy anything based on reviews there? They're obviously silly and exchanged for discounts and "coins" so I just ignore them in a way I don't elsewhere.
I quite like AE because you can avoid the app and returns on DOAs often just involve a refund without returning anything. There are silly annoyances, and sometimes buying locally is inexplicably cheaper, but for little electronics, they're hard to beat.
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Good. They're pushing overpriced low-quality junk. If you want to buy from Temu but want a better chance at reasonable prices, shop AliExpress.
IMO Temu and Aliexpress/Alibaba market themselves in a very different way. In many ways I consider Aliexpress to be more reputable just because they don't try to pull the wool over your eyes with their products. With Temu they try to make it seem like the products are just as good as what you get at Walmart. With Aliexpress at least they just straight up tell you they are a "front" for all the factories in Shenzhen.
I found Aliexpress to be great for retro gaming consoles, for anyone interested and willing to wait, you can get an "R36S" which can play all the old gameboy games and other retro games for ~$30.
The other advantage with Alibaba is you can interact directly with the companies doing the manufacturing.
Several years ago, I was frustrated with the insane costs of hockey sticks. I'd been going through sticks at about a 6-8 month clip since high school and having to buy $300 hockey sticks every six months was not something I was happy about.
I got on Alibaba, sent out several emails saying I was an equipment manager for a US based hockey team. The team was looking to get some stock sticks for backups since players were going through sticks like crazy.
I emailed two companies who did carbon fiber manufacturing. One company made one-piece composite sticks that were blank. You could tell them what length, flex, lie and blade pattern you wanted and then if you wanted 12K or 14K carbon fibre. I got two 12K blanks. They were impressively durable and lasted for well over a year. Almost twice as long as my expensive retail sticks. They were a little more whippy than I was used to, but it was easy getting used to it.
The other company was a bit shady. The first email I got back was someone asking me how many top of the line Bauer sticks I needed. I asked him how that was possible and he just said he had access and just give him the specs and they'll send them out. I ordered two of those to boot thinking it was a pretty big gamble. Turns out they were legit. My buddies who used the same retail model couldn't tell the difference. We went over the graphics and couldn't see any difference either. Ironically, I still have one of these Bauer 1X Lite sticks that I use when I get down to a single stick and I'm waiting for the newer ones to ship.
Interestingly enough, by the time I had gone through three of the sticks, suddenly there were several companies popping up offering "blank" sticks for a fraction of the cost of the retail sticks. Effectively doing the same thing I did, but now as legit hockey companies trying to save players some money. All told, I think I spent around $500 for the 4 sticks I bought. A fraction of what retail sticks would've cost. I haven't gone back and ordered more sticks, just because there's so many pro stock stuff out there and so many other companies selling these blanks now.
Compared to everything else it feels pretty minor but I'm fairly worried about the handheld retro gaming market. I really enjoy it as a hobby but it seems like almost all of those devices will no longer be profitable / worth buying if the tariffs are enforced on them.
I've been really enjoying my recent Anbernic RG 406V and it can play pretty much all the systems I want it to so I guess I'll just stick to that if the handheld market collapses.
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There's a different cost vs. shipping tradeoff between the two. I use Temu for little electronic things (OLED panels with breakout header pins, microcontroller boards, breadboards, etc). For that purpose, Temu's prices are much better than any domestic seller, for a product that is exactly the same for my purposes. And, unlike Aliexpress, it won't take a fiscal quarter for your stuff to arrive.
AliExpress shipping has gotten noticeably faster even over the five years that I've been using it. Just about everything arrives within a week now.
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I have ordered loads of stuff off Aliexpress, in the exact category you described. Never taken more than ~1 week to reach. Aliexpress shipping is actually quicker than Amazon if you don't have Prime.
AliExpress stuff arrives within a week nowadays. I am in the EU and often it even ships from a warehouse in the EU.
When was the last time you used it? It was definitely true a few years ago.
There's an art to buy good products from AliExpress. You must order by number of items sold. See bad reviews. See the seller rate.
They are making each time more difficult to assert the product quality. I'm super careful, but still sometimes buy from seller SHOP123456789
Part of my AliExpress purchasing workflow is checking reviews for the item I'm about to buy on Amazon, as they're (usually) higher quality than the "just received item, 5 stars" reviews on AliExpress.
Applies to eBay and Amazon too ..
The idea that Temu is gonna end is nonsense. First of all, the US is just one market for them. They're red hot in many countries in latin America, Asia, Africa and so many others. Moreover, I guess they'll eventually find other ways to sell products in the USA, in one way or another.
What's the difference between them and Wish.com then? Wish eventually failed, but Temu still seems to be trucking along.
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Temu vs. AliExpress is usually a shipment speed vs. cost tradeoff. Their catalogues also differ quite a bit in some areas, so sometimes one has to use one or the other.
I feel like AliExpress has improved in this area though, likely due to pressure from Temu.
A few months ago, I had an AliExpress order beat an Amazon order to my house. I wasn't using Prime, but the AliExpress order did ship from China. It took about a week.
Is it any difference than shopping from Amazon, except you don't have to pay the dropshipping markup?
Worse support. Amazon usually will try and make you whole-ish, aliexpress is like lmao
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I've had so much good luck with AliExpress. I wouldn't order anything I might need to return. But I've never received something that needed that. I can't begin to describe how disappointing these tariffs are going to be for me. It's not as if I can or ever will be able to buy these things locally.
Not only that, their ads are incredibly invasive, often taking over the majority of a page.
Whoever's doing the "design" on Temu and Ali seems to think all Americans want to feel like they're in Vegas while shopping. It's very obnoxious, to the point that people have created plug-ins to clean things up (e.g. AliTools Shopping Assistant, AliRadar).
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Aren't Temu/Shein considered to be ultra-low-quality garbage, mostly? Don't people haul their items in order to promote their useless Instagram/TikTok, so their followers will buy the same ultra-low-quality garbage?
Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of direct access to overseas markets, rather than local distributors slapping 200% margin on Chinese sourced/produced items that you can buy from AliExpress. But I'm not in favor of flooding the market with cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap that ends up in landfill in a few weeks or days.
So no, I don't feel sorry for Temu.
I don't get this argument. All the cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap will still exist, it's just going to be sold on Amazon with 1-day shipping. Consumers want these products and the market just fills the demand. The deregulation that will take place under this administration will lead to even more, toxic, unsafe crap flooding the market, except it'll just be manufactured in the U.S.
The same item on Amazon will cost x2/3 times than Temu, if you will be able to find the same item at all, meaning it cuts a big chunk of the potential buyers of the cheap crap.
The world would have been a better place if we hadn't been allowed to flood the market with cheap crap. Not only it creates enormous waste, it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name crap.
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No idea about Temu, but I've been told that some clothes from Shein are better and cheaper than what we sometimes find in the cheaper local stores (UK).
I hope temu and the other Chinese companies in that segment stop selling overseas. Their model is just incredibly destructive to the environment, they ship over the lowest quality garbage imaginable and create so much pollution and waste in the process.
I also have quite a bit of disdain for people using these sites. Nobody needs this and it is just harmful all around.
You will find the exact same items on Amazon, except usually more expensive.
There are many items sold on Aliexpress that are of decent quality.
I think the point is to buy what you really need, and focus on quality, rather than impulse buying cheap stuff that ends up in the garbage after a month.
Our consumerism is hooked onto cheap crap, the factories producing it are only fulfilling the demand.
Demand doesn't need to get fulfilled. The people profiting off this are still the other half of the problem.
It's just a natural byproduct of poverty and a shrinking middle class in the United States. HN readers are not the target customers of Temu. It's those people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and can't afford quality goods whatsoever. It's the same as the low quality garbage found in predatory dollar stores in poor neighborhoods.
If you pay peanuts obviously you’re gonna get garbage. You chose to buy garbage, why blame the producer lol.
I don't buy anything from temu, but I also want that nobody else buys stuff from temu.
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I did an experiment for my blog awhile back that never got written up (lack of time, mostly), but it is was just me ordering about $30US of stuff from Temu to see why they were so aggressively marketing themselves, the app auto-installing on my Samsung smartphone I have for work, etc.
The experience left me feeling very, very dirty.
The items in question were some small fire sticks for camping, a couple of solar portable power banks, and two small canvas backpacks. Each arrived in separate packages on different days, all shipped from what appeared to be the same CA facility, so right off the bat, we're two strikes against environmental friendliness.
The items were, as you'd expect, utter trash.
- Fire Sicks: these are those magnesium bars shaped like a little key that you strike with a piece of metal to create a spark, this allowing you to maybe start a fire. Now, I've been starting camp fires without flame for most of my life (probably the only thing I took away from my time in the Boy Scouts), so I've seen plenty of junk products that claim to do the same, but these take the cake. The actual "magnesium" bar was coated in a thick black paint for some reason? And the striking tool is a flimsy piece of aluminum coated in orange paint. Useless. I had to use a bit of sandpaper to remove the paint, giving access to the metal parts of both tools, and even then, the spark created was barely hot enough to catch a pile of dead leaves on fire. I don't know what they actually used to make these, but don't assume they will save your butt in a survival situation
- "Solar" Battery Bank: these are just regular USB power banks with a an extremely inefficient photovoltaic panel glued on. It is only capable of powering the green "charging" LED but definitely does not recharge the power bank itself. After I discharged them to see how long it would take to recharge with the solar panel, they sat in direct sunlight for 3 full days before I gave up with no additional power stored. However, they're not a total loss. They still work as you'd expect a regular USB power bank would, rechargeable with a typical micro-USB cord with two outputs to charge your devices. Didn't notice any weird voltages when charging my stuff, either. At the very least, they will not end up in a landfill because I can make use of them on camping trips.
- Canvas Backpack: the stitching is a joke, so don't expect to put anything heavy in these. My wife sews as a hobby, ended up deconstructing them and reinforcing them with some proper canvas material that made them way more rugged and able to hold gear (I use one for fishing magnet crap and the other for rock-hounding tools) but we could not help but wonder just how little the workers were paid to paid these garbage bags and what those conditions are like.
Their business model is built entirely on selling you garbage you do not need that will likely just be thrown away after a few (if any) uses unless you are more diy, willing to try to find ways to make things work or repurpose them. The entire shopping experience is gamified with spinning wheels and lightning deals, coupons falling from the sky, etc, to the point where it was ridiculous and intrusively preventing from searching for things I wanted to order. It felt like their target audience was the old ladies I see spending 8 hours a day glue to the chair of a slot machine in the local casinos. It was so absurd I felt like was in a cartoon about consumerism and actually experienced guilt for having conducted the experiment.
I personally am always weary of cheap power banks. Given the rest of the corners cut on the device, how sure are you that the circuitry and the batteries themselves are of acceptable safety standards.
Even the batteries in expensive devices can become dangerous and I would assume that those undergo some higher leven of QA, testing and safety standards.
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I understand it was an experiment but camping supplies are the very last thing I’d order from a site whose entire purpose is to peddle low quality garbage.
> they ship over the lowest quality garbage imaginable and create so much pollution and waste in the process.
Lots of words for "I ordered something on Temu once, got scammed, now the whole industry should burn down"
I have never ordered anything on temu and I never will.
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> create so much pollution and waste in the process
Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
The only exception is something where the only purpose is to be environmentally good (maybe planting some trees, maybe something that reduces energy usage).
Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
>Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
No, it depends on what you do with that income.
>Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
Plainly false. E.g. more expensive things made of natural materials and lasting for a long time create much less landfill than products which are cheap but last only a short time.
I own expensive shelfs which my parent bought for me as a child decades ago. They are literally "as good as new", much of the IKEA furniture I had to replace. Clearly the IKEA furniture had a bigger impact, although it was "cheaper".
>Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
All complaining I do is pointless. Obviously no institution who could force change is making decisions based on my HN posts.
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Interesting dynamic here with echoes of the .com bubble where there is a huge web of industries all dependent on the current setup continuing and money being available for consumer spending and ads - when that dries up it will impact not just those selling goods imported from China, but everyone in the US.
Disrupting US trade quickly with massive global tariffs will cause all sorts of secondary effects like a massive downturn in ad spending - directly affecting companies like Meta and Google who look insulated right now because they don't sell physical products.
Not a great time to be dependent on ad revenue.
Conclusion is wrong here. There’s plenty of bid for the ad inventory. Google and meta are extremely resilient to this kind of thing
I can't see how can add industry be resilient to recession. Maybe if you switch to selling ads for government propaganda?
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Even when this kind of thing is a global recession and the end of US supremacy?
If they stick with the tariffs we’ll see I guess though it seems likely Trump will have to back down.
Good riddance. I'd rather have fewer things I care more about. If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier, need less space and spend less money even at higher prices. And when we do need to buy things, we'll be either supporting local workers or friendly nations.
> If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier, need less space and spend less money even at higher prices.
I can't believe how many people are trying to put a positive spin on the government imposing massive taxation on people's right to buy things from other countries.
It's easy to sneer at junk fashion from Temu or whatever, but access to cheap tools and parts was the lifeblood of hobbyists and experimenters across the country.
It's not just cheap clothes from Temu. This administration just took away your right to buy anything cheaply internationally. That's not a good thing.
I think two things can be true at the same time: these taxes are ridiculous, and ordering a 75-cents part from the other side of the planet is a massive waste of resources.
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You’re correct, but sometimes bad things accidentally have a few good things
So destroying the economy is worth making a few people feel better about minimizing their life? Because that's what is happening. How about people exercise some common sense and not buy things they don't need as opposed to millions of people becoming homeless and military aggression between the USA and China getting much more likely
Some people may feel that their economy was already destroyed when manufacturing was moved to China. Ever drive around Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, etc? So many dead towns, thanks to jobs moving elsewhere.
I think ending the pipeline of landfill fodder from Temu is a great thing. That kind of consumerism is like eating a diet of pure sugar. Feels good for a second, but bad for the consumer, environment and economy.
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Ooof, vote blue vs Temu is a dire state of politics
So throwing society into chaos with a sudden opium ban is worth making a few self righteous officials feel better about controlling everyone's lives? Because that's what this crackdown is bringing. How about people exercise some willpower and moderation with the pipe, instead of driving the entire opium trade underground, creating violence between smugglers, ruining the livelihoods of countless ordinary people caught in the middle, and practically begging the Western powers to escalate their military actions against us when their precious trade is disrupted?
I doubt anyone is seriously arguing the tariffs as implemented are the solution.
On the other hand, if you're thinking all opposition to the tariffs need to agree then you're deluding yourself (not trying to be antagonistic here, but it's dangerous to be blind to alternatives.)
For instance, a smaller tariff on completed Luxury goods and a removal of the Temu exception could've easily been the play and potentially could've been done without much fanfare (by someone who wasn't Trump obviously)
> If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier
If we wished upon a star that humans were better a lot of problems would go away. In the real world, poor people will make do and those with resources will buy smuggled goods. I’m already diverting a spring skiing trip to Canada because it’s cheaper to buy kit there than here.
This is what will happen, it's why Americans and American got into the cheaper, Chinese made goods thing in the first place, there was a LOT of demand for cheaper stuff.
People will just do less, become more poor and have less opportunities or work around the system by smuggling things from Canada or something.
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> we'll be either supporting local workers or friendly nations
Are there any friendly nations left?
God I hope not.
What about buying some largest-in-the-world microcontrollers from Russia?
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>Are there any friendly nations left?
From Trump POV: Ruzzia
Good for you, but it's not all about rabid consumption. My girlfriend has been into jewelry making and ordered a lot of stuff off temu, which she gave away the end product to friends and family. That'll most likely be prohibitively expensive at this point
Temu has notoriously low standards when it comes to jewelry and other jewelry related items. Reddit threads are full of horror stories about toxic materials being used for these items. Be careful what you give out to friends and family.
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She could give cards, food items or hugs. You don't need to cover people in cheap temu stuff to show you love them.
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Do tariffs raise the quality of domestic substitutions, or do we simply pay more?
For many products, domestically manufactured substitutes still have some inputs that come from international suppliers.
Could be some raw materials, the machines that make it, or the packaging. Now everything is going to be massively more expensive and it's going to have impacts even on domestically manufactured goods.
There's also the substitution effect, where heavy tariffs on one thing will increase demand on substitutes and therefore raise their prices.
It's really bad policy all around. Nobody who has any familiarity with manufacturing thinks it's going to encourage more domestic manufacturing because the tariffs suddenly restricted your ability to buy inputs and machines at reasonable prices. You're better off building a factory in another country to service global demand.
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Tariffs lower the quality and increase the prices of domestic substitutes. There is no competition. Tariffs are how business is done in third-world countries like India. Production of everything is banned/controlled, except for the few buddies of the government in power.
Either you will pay more for domestic producers or (more likely) you will not pay at all since either domestic production will not ramp up for niche things, or you will not be willing to pay hikes domestic prices for the same utility.
lower quality, higher price.
You were always free to buy fewer things you care more about.
This isn’t true, because the subsidized stuff from China drove medium-quality choices out of the market.
Try to buy some nicer jeans or T-shirts. The choices are stuff made as cheaply as possible, brand name stuff made as cheaply as possible but marked up like it isn’t, and actual quality clothes at 15x the price of the cheapest stuff. Most of the US clothing manufacturers have pivoted to the high-end just to survive or moved production overseas and are coasting along on their brand reputation.
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but they are not giving them time to rethink ...
I agree. There should be a global blockade of the USA to return the standard of living to the stone age. Why stop at tariffs?
Well, from outside it seems that the list of friendly nations keep getting smaller and smaller… and good luck replacing the vast majority of your supply chain with local workers. Just look where all the products you currently have were made.
Ads was THE thing that our tech industry was exporting to the world. I was astonished with the people who thought that tech would be not affected by the tariffs.
That doesn't make sense, as ads are useless without consumption (i.e. imports). We did manage to monetize our consumption thru ads though.
The world is still consuming. Even if the US tariffs everyone else, they still trade amongst themselves. The real risk to our economy is that the rest of the world stops paying for our services and cultural exports.
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I'm relatively happy whenever I see negative news about Temu. Call it a bias, though my limited data[0] (itself biased) supports whatever negative perceptions I have towards Temu. The only brand to get 0/100? Why does human exploitation always have to pair with the absolute cheapest prices sourced from developing countries?
[0]: https://baptistworldaid.org.au/resources/ethical-fashion-rep...
I first learned about Temu when someone I barely knew messaged me saying they needed me to sign up to Temu under some referral code so they could get bonus points to shop more. They were addicted to shopping, and Temu was the most addictive thing on the internet. Like the Dollar Store, Amazon, slots, and a pyramid scheme, rolled into one.
> shut off Google Shopping ads... App Store ranking subsequently plummeting
Are they implying that app store ranking was quid pro quo for ads buys?
They directly say what they mean in the article
> The company’s inability to maintain app performance without advertising for even a single day demonstrates the fragility of its market position.
App store ranking is based on installs. Ads drive people to install the app. Less ads -> less installs -> lower ranking. Seems like a logical consequence.
I don't know about quid pro quo but those ads are content on the internet so I would assume that would drop SEO and new installs.
One of the strange patterns with Google is that quid pro quo is hard to even filter out as in some cases it is actually a natural part of the system. Probably a bad thing.
Could the two have a common cause? What if Temu stopped buying ads and consumers stopped installing the Temu app for one and the same reason, namely that trade barriers are being erected that will make Temu unpalatable for many users, something widely publicized and known both to Temu and consumers?
its also seo linkjuice as they are links
HN can't stop being HN. Scary article about a global trade war gets interpreted as "Wait, is Google actually behind this?!"
How does this make sense? Google isn't affiliated with the App Store (note the capitals), and instead it's operated by its competitor.
I take "App Store" as generic to mean any app store, like Apple's or Google's
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App Store ranking is determined heavily by install volume.
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Lot of "good they only sell crap" comments here. Would you guys feel the same about your neighborhood dollar store?
Yes. Your spending is a far more powerful vote than any democratic process. Your society is what it spends on. A society addicted to cheap trash is going to be precisely that.
These 'dollar stores' are wealth extraction centres, which don't really provide anything to society other than enriching a dropshipping middle class and foreign exploitative factory owner class. There's very little value being created.
I'd far rather support places where purchases have numerous positive externalities, whether it be from labour conditions to promoting curiosity, or from environmental impacts, to building local communities.
Society was doing quite ok until the greedy middleman classes decided to render the domestic working classes irrelevant for a little short-term profit, just so we can buy new LED lights, or change our t-shirt collection every week.
The dollar store moves into neighborhoods that are impoverished as part of their strategy, and push out family owned businesses and would be competition through extreme saturation.
I'd love to see them go.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/19/business/dollar-general-oppos...
Dollar general is not a "dollar store" where everything costs a dollar. not even dollar tree is that now though...
Temu and Shein sell cheap crap.
Dollar stores sell cheap crap and destroy communities.
So no, I don't feel quite the same about them.
Speaking of, anyone else has encountered issues while browsing temu? I'm facing captcha's most of the time. I mean the "slide to move piece into a position" which most of the times fails, after which I'm facing a more "difficult" pick object of color repeated etc. The site also after a while of browsing not logged in pushes me into login page. So I wonder if it's my browser and various adblocking extensions or it's a common thing?
almost always because your adblocking extensions. They plants cookies and checks for that, and they never have to obverse gpdr.
They do cross domain requests to keep those trackers around.
adblocking extension hates cross-domain tracking.
Damn, I forgot about cross-domain tracking. I'm either browsing or shopping on every platform in private mode - perhaps that also rolls me onto... the great captcha wall.
This might more be a European thing, but over here some of the sellers on marketplaces like Amazon, are linked with organised VAT/Tax fraud. While I can't say it's all, it'll all things being equal, be baked in to the competitive dynamics. Thus undercutting legal operators, or destroying their profit (incentive) to provide good or domestically produced wares. There's a podcast episode from some ML (money laundering) specialists, that make mention of it. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/trigger-warning/id1448...
i dont know how long temu will last without americans, but it feels surreal that europeans have more buying power than americans
Americans definitely have more buying power than Europe. This doesn't look to be true.
If you use the PPP adjusted per capita GDP as a comparison metric the US stands about 37% higher than the EU. Considering the baseline tariff of 10% and the substantially higher tariffs for important trading partners the US targets, it may actually even out.
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I don't know how long America will last without temu (or wallmart)
latest stats I saw had US at ~53%, followed by 12.9% Mexico, 7.4% United Kingdom, 6.4% France, 6.0% Germany, 4.6% Spain & 9.8% Others.
Temu is absolutely amazing. I went from being a frequent Amazon customer in 2020 to not having used Amazon at all in 2024, all thanks to Temu.
I wonder what percentage of their sales has been in the US.
43% in 2023 https://ecdb.com/blog/temu-revenue/4995
They may not be toast, but I suspect there are many panicked planning meetings happening now. (Unless they were clever and had a plan ready for a while)
They did have a plan. Temu/Shein used to ship directly from China, handling the shipping themselves for the sellers on their platforms.
Since a year or two ago (or even earlier), they started accepting (and encouraging) sellers to handle the shipping themselves (while still maintaining a fast shipping time) by giving those sellers more traffic.
In order to have fast shipping time, it basically mean the sellers need to have warehouses (or 3rd party warehouses) in the USA. It's easier for the sellers to workaround the tariffs when they are shipping in bulk to the USA.
The prices will be higher for sure, but it will be a lot lower than people are expecting.
Not sure how well the plan will work. Just what I heard from people working in the industry.
As far as I know in Europe TEMU sends stuff from local fulfillment centers.
So maybe TEMU US can return in that form if the trade conflict settles.
They aim to send 80% from European warehouses, but it's less than a year since they started so there's no figure for the current amount.
The tax is the same either way, since they collect VAT for packages sent from China. The advantage is the faster delivery time.
The Temu ads I see are so awful that they totally put me off from even wanting to look at their site.
Good, happy to see this!
I wonder what the environmental impact of this would be.
No loss there
Temu's whole grift was subsidized products and subsided shipping and both of those things are no longer available why would they continue to worry about the US?
Oh no!
anyway..
temu and shein are cooked
Less cheap junk flowing into the US sounds like a win to me. Maybe clothes should be more expensive and better quality.
I already buy a lot of clothes at least partially made in OECD states. Even with that “partially” doing a lot of work and my avoiding paying extra for “fancy” brand names… I don’t think Americans earning closer to median household income are gonna be happy about paying the kind of prices I pay.
At least we can rest assured that they will be more expensive.
Now I need to pay 10x for a USB cable, a charger etc.
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Also less affordable electronics
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the thing is that life is about freedom of choice, I didn't buy they cheap junk, I'm fairly normal. I might be the occasional hobby board off alibaba express a couple times a year. Choice is good, not bad.
Maybe the law should impose quality and environmental standards instead of tariffs. But no, that would hurt domestic businesses.
The market does what people want. Fast fashion is exactly what people want because fashion has always been changing fast and about the "new thing" and people like to be able to buy new stuff all the time.
Here you go: enjoy your $120 American jeans: https://originusa.com/collections/jeans (Oh look its on sale 20$ off...yay :/ )
The sale discount is the entire amount I was able to buy my non American jeans for. :/
I guess I can make due with one pair for the week...or wash them each day(oh wait thats gotten more expensive as well).
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If the de minimus rule is in-fact suspended on May 2nd, yes. Hasn’t happened yet, so who knows.
Amazon and other US selling platforms are also in trouble, given how much of their income is from drop shippers.
Well, given how many of their products come from China, right? How many of the products on sale on Amazon are partly or entirely produced in China? Those will have 125% (145? How mush is it today?) import duty on them, unless they're electronics.
too little too late for Forever 21 and it's 350 locations which once employed 43,000 people at it's peak: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/17/forever-21-files-for-second-...
The temu/shein loophole should been closed ages ago.
I'm surprised the Chinese sellers are able to compete for fast fashion. Clothes are the one thing I don't really buy online because getting sizing right is already hard even when you're not dealing with Temu-style "well actually we said there's a +- 25 tolerance in the fine print and this is within tolerance" bullshit.
AliExpress is indispensable for small technical items. If they're available locally at all, shipping included they'd often cost 10-20x as much.
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They tried closing the loophole a month ago. It was such a burden trying to track and collect tariffs on small shipments they gave up.
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It is pretty crazy how worker unfriendly US trade policy has been for so long.
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> The temu/shein loophole should been closed ages ago.
Or the US should figure out how to get domestic shipping rates to be as cheap as the rates that Chinese shippers pay to ship to the US.
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Finally