[vasco]

To be honest Temu sounds like someone was watching the Wish.com saga and decided it was a great idea to burn a bunch of billions. It can grow a lot while it's new but I have my doubts about longevity of this type "we only sell crap" platforms.

[resolutebat]

At least in Australia Temu hits the sweet spot of offering almost-China prices with reasonably speedy delivery (under a week). If you buy the same crap on Amazon.au, you pay a 3-4x premium for local warehousing, and if you buy it off AliExpress, it often takes a month or longer to deliver.

That said, I presume the only way Temu can pull this off logistically is air freight, so I also have my doubts about his sustainable this is.

[AussieWog93]

Aliexpress have been great recently with shipping times.

A lot of stuff is dispatched from their local warehouses (or at least flown in from China and consolidated locally) and distributed by their own courier network.

Sounds similar to Temu, and TBH is probably exactly the same network. If you get tracking updates from "Fast Horse Express", it's definitely the same network. :)

[resolutebat]

Yeah, Aliexpress "premium shipping" is by air, and like Temu they have a minimum order threshold to trigger it. But Aliexpress is a messy jumble of tiny merchants with their own shipping fees etc etc, whereas Temu abstracts away all that complexity.

[1-more]

I've been getting ads on social media to buy silencers on Temu. Ok not silencers, but adapters where one end has the female thread of a soda bottle on it, and the other has the female thread to match the external thread available on a Ruger 10/22. While silencers are federally legal in the U.S., they are illegal in many states and subject to a federal transfer tax. I could see this being a problem for Temu, and I could also see this never being any kind of problem for Temu.

There may be settled case law that says these aren't silencers legally, idk. The whole discipline is hilariously talmudic and full of the heap problem (is a billet of metal a gun? What about with one hole in it? Two holes and a chamfer here and a routed channel there? etc.)

[thegaulofthem]

Suppressors are only Federally legal with a tax stamp, typically acquired with a “Form 1” self manufacture or a Form 4” transfer (purchase) along with a $200 tax for the stamp, per item.

The seller would need special ATF licensure and follow an onerous process to sell what is typically considered safety equipment in Europe, ironically. This involves submitting fingerprints, passport photos, and a lengthy (9+ month) approval process on the part of the ATF.

For the self-manufacture, this has been de-factor outlawed by the current regime with DIY kits being arbitrarily reclassified as suppressors themselves. Most if not all Form 1 builds are outright denied.

So, in short, Temu cannot sell these at all. Of course they also occasionally sell selector switches to concert Glock handguns to fully automatic. This is even more comically illegal than a suppressor workaround.

[1-more]

right, I forgot to mention that manufacture also requires a tax stamp which is only available to registered manufacturers.

And yeah the Glock switch thing is absolutely wild. Sure, calling a shoelace a machine gun[0] stretches philosophy a fair bit. But the widespread availability of a bit of hardware that can only add select fire to a handgun tells me that enforcement is only a problem for those willing to adhere to the rules at all.

0: https://i.imgur.com/FCbDv.jpg

[coredog64]

Silencer or a “WIX fuel filter (wink, wink)”?

[lopis]

You'd be surprised how many people fall for these kinds of unbelievable deals from ads on social media apps, over and over again.

[jeron]

there's an unsubstantiated rumor that Temu is a Chinese money laundering operation - burning a bunch of billions to legitimize a lot of other billions

[sudosysgen]

Temu is fundamentally different than Wish - it has local warehouses and therefore much faster delivery. It's a competitor to Amazon, not Wish/AliExpress. It trades this off by having a much smaller selection of goods.

[adamsmark]

Its a mix is it not? Both local and global? Some of the prices and lead times look like inventory is coming from China via ePacket.

[sudosysgen]

Of course, there's always going to be some items not available at the local warehouse, but that's the same thing with Amazon.