Comment by geor9e
5 days ago
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.
To clarify, I'm not defending the tariffs or the way this whole thing is implemented. I'm sure it puts a lot of people in trouble.
I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of. Sure at the individual level we can find advantages to it, but I'm arguing that we're collectively worst off.
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Yeah pretty funny to see mostly the same people calling for a $20+/hr "minimum wage" on one hand, and bemoaning the tarrifs on the other hand. They will tell you that if you can't pay your employees that much, then you don't have a viable business. But they will turn around and whine about how their cheap Chinese crap purchases are now going to cost what a "viable" domestic producer would have to charge.
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This is a bit orthogonal to the broader conversation, but you've hooked me with your predicament: Can you allow for preorders or "Expressed interest" at a new price point? (or at a hand-wavy price point to assess interest re: overhead/bulk/etc.) If tariffs come down, you can refund/credit, but for customers who wanted this, something-at-some-price may be better than nothing-at-any-price.
> 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.
I am bugged more by local environmental impacts.
Around the time that manufacturing started moving to China en masse in the 1990s I started to hear about trichloroethylene contamination at manufacturing sites in the U.S. Look up "trichloroethylene united states" in Google and you'll probably get results about how our marines were exposed at Camp Jejune and are now eligible for V.A. benefits. A search for "trichloroethylene china" might turn up a picture of a truck full of barrels from a company that wants to send you those barrels.
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> 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
This was the logic under Deng, and the reason China is now a peer state. Unfortunately when doing business with communists, enriching them doesn't help the individuals move out of poverty because that would require wages to rise and that happens for political reasons not merit in a single party system
If we enrich the CCP we just end up with an adversary capable of taking us on. That's why tariffs.
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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.
I don't think it's the packaging -- I'd you're buying one thing a day a ton of it is just going to pure waste, eventually to the landfill.
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.
> But, someone buying stuff made by their employer is not what harms them.
It is exactly what harms them.
With that logic one can defend keeping children in tantalum mines in the supply chain of an iPhone. That's not an acceptable status quo...
Removing the market for immoral exploitation of beings and the environment is a necessary step. The size of the market for things made fairly needs to grow.
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*losing
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 - ???
The nicotine bottle size constraint is a safety concern. Spilling a 200ml bottle of nicotine easily has the potential to cause lethality or morbidity through skin absorption, particularly in children. A 10ml bottle can still cause injury, but it is way more likely to be survivable.
In this case, the safety concerns outweigh the environmental concerns.
> good:
> - replace plastic straws/cups with paper based ones
This belongs at least in "questionable" if not just "bad"
I'm so out of the vice loop. What nicotine products do you buy in a bottle?
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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.
The person you are replying to isn't claiming that the seller pays the tariffs, they are saying that it's not in the seller's interest to notify buyers of the tariff charge because it's essentially free anti-tariff messaging once buyers are hit with the sudden fees.
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But the person receiving the package doesn't receive the package until they've paid the tariff.
You don't have to pay it -- if you don't, the package gets returned to sender or destroyed.
The post office delivers you a slip with information to go to your local post office to pay it and pick up the package. With UPS and FedEx you get a notice to pay online, and they deliver it once you do, as far as I know.
I've never heard of something being delivered without the tariff already having been paid, and then it going to collections. Has anyone ever experienced that personally? I don't see how that would be legal, or why a delivery service would expose themselves to risk of nonpayment.
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> send you to collections if you don't pay it That doesn't make sense. So can I cause troubles to someone by ordering an unwanted $1 temu item to their house, and thereby summon a collection agency to them (if they don't pay the $75 fee)?
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Kind of. People can always refuse to pay it and charge back. I'd imagine the US is about to have a massive amount of unclaimed parcels to deal with.
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In the EU they do care (or rather the advertised price already included all fees, tariffs and VAT).
I think they also send everything from EU warehouses because that loophole was closed years ago.
The parent comment is joking that everyone should look for disgruntled Temu users and ask if they have few minutes to talk about laws and tariffs.
No offense to guys talking about other topics on those occasions.
> They don't pay the tariffs. The person receiving the package does.
How does that work? I am assuming it’s not US as I had never got any tariff charges or brokerage fees from the likes of FedEx or UPS.
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That's not what happens. You see the price tag, you just don't buy it, is what happens.
That's not how tariffs work.
You pay the sticker price, which does not include tariffs. The package ships. It arrives at the US border, and the carrier (DHL or whoever) bills you for the import tax before it leaves the port.
Maybe this will change, but up until now when importing things, tariffs were not part of the price paid to the seller.
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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.
The UK-EU trade volume is three times larger than that between UK-US.
That's definitely not what Brexit was and is about. Go ask a fellow british about that.
> Brexit literally just resulted in the UK having lower tariffs
That is, of course, entirely false. In that the UK does not, in fact, have lower tariffs, and even if that would be the case, there are many downsides that don’t have anything to do with tariffs.
> and a probable free trade deal with the largest economy on the planet
The FTA with the US has been "happening soon" for about a decade now. I’ll believe it when I see it. And with a protectionist American government, it would put the UK at a significant disadvantage.
> unlike our friends on the European continent
LOL. Nobody on the continent wants its country in the same position as the UK is. Brexit killed any political movement to leave the EU for a generation.
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Brexit has been a disaster for the UK otherwise and anyone with eyes can see that
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> probable free trade deal
While hoping is free, the negative impact of Brexit has been extensively documented. Hell, there's even a Wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit
I guess brexit insanity and trump insanity cancel each other out then
> probable free trade deal with the largest economy on the planet.
Get ready for the chlorine chicken!
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...
As far as I know, the way it works is shipping companies can do the % package value (ad valorem duty) or the flat rate per package (specific duty) but have to do the same method for all packages and can only change their method once a month.[1]
My speculation is the ad valorem duty requires more manpower to implement and so that's why there's the specific duty option. Especially because they originally temporarily halted the de minimis changes due to USPS not being able to handle it.
Executive order 14266 is the most recent rates with 120% ad valorem or $100 / $200 specific (gated by date as noted above). [2]
[1] EO 14256: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/furt...
[2] EO 14266: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/modi...
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Wow I’m genuinely surprised that’s not getting more press. That’s absolutely going to shock the hell out of some people.
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How long will it take him to change his mind again? He has already exempted a bunch of stuff from tariffs, coincidentally the same stuff that is likely to be imported because the US doesn't make much of its own of.
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.
That’s all true, but you are leaving out an important piece of information that, at least for AliExpress, the VAT is already included in the price and there’s no additional customs processing fee.
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> But the processing fee for customs is usually 20-40 USD. Which can exceed the cost of the package in the first place.
It depends on who you are buying from. This is the order of magnitude of the fee if you let the shipping company handle it. It is extortionate and they do it because at this point buyers don’t have a choice if they want their stuff.
Companies that are used to dealing with foreign customers handle taxes themselves and don’t charge processing fees.
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.
Aliexpress also changed a lot there. I'm not sure if it goes for all vendors, but my last purchases have been very fast. Some even shipped from Europe, but even if from China the wait time of several weeks did not happen anymore.
I assume they made a similar change.
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".
Shein biggest thing is actually AI/ML. As far I remember, what they really invested is on the service per see. Shein gather data from consumers on internet, on what's the latest trends/art, and just create clothes. And they do this like, always.
There's no "Summer" or "Winter" season clothes. They just update them continually.
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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.
>And doing the last mile yourself is a lot more inefficient than a post service doing it.
How do you figure?
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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 ..
It’s random dice throw. On average Trump has shot US in both feet unnecessarily.
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.
That there is a minimum fee doesn't necessarily mean the customer pays it on arrival. It could also be charged to the sender in advance, and if they don't pay, the package is simply not delivered at all.
If you could cheaply send stuff to random people to make them pay huge fees when they get something they didn't even order, that would be quite bad...
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> the hobbyist and electronics worlds are about to get hit extremely hard
Speak for yourself. I am in this world but I am not in USA and I won't be subject to your stupid tariffs. Good luck to you.
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.
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...
I enjoy the cheap shipping (from Aliexpress China warehouses to Germany), but I really wish this would be improved. It just seems nonsensical. There should be a closer relation to actual cost, but paying 4-5€ for a national shipment, versus essentially nothing for Chinese shipments, is mad.
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Yeah the outcomes here are insane -
Here in Australia I can order a $10 (AUD) item from aliexpress and get free shipping from China. But as a consumer or small busines, if I want to send anything bigger than a letter within Australia it's likely to cost me way more than $10 just for the postage.
It doesn't make sense and it must distort retail trade in China's favour. I'm honestly not surprised the US withdrew from that treaty, I think it needs reworking.
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> 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.
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.
And nobody ever lied on those Chinese envelopes with the value declaration. ;)
Also, I can tell you that the country of origin field has one of the lowest entry qualities of all fields. People just don't bother, and customs don't have the capacity. Also, depending on your warehousing, there is a good chance you simply don't know. If something in your item bucket came from either China, Vietnam, Malaysia or the Philippines, what are you gonna write?
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How does what you say not make it work though? Are you aware that people lie for financial gains?
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I've seen a few headlines in our local news here in Australia about how nobody knows what amount of Chinese ingredients will result in the final product being hit with Chinese tariffs, even though the products are assembled here.
Russia has 0% tariffs, so they're probably going to ship through there.
China is 'best friends' with Russia, Russia is best friends with Trump. Huge piles of cash for everyone on the inside there.
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.
Reading this thread is mind-boggling. People complaining that cheap garbage from Temu is falling apart. People proudly proclaiming that they order Chinese crap almost daily. An argument about whether one crap peddler is better than another one.
Am I taking crazy pills? Am I the only one who buys things a few times per year? This rampant consumerism is depressing.
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"exagerrating a bit" ? I've bought a few things off Temu and Shein, and the quality's been perfectly acceptable.
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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.