
23 years later and MGS2 still holds as gospel.
China's Ministry of Commerce has issued a policy calling for massive expansion of the nation's cross-border e-commerce industry. The policy document, published on Tuesday, labels cross-border e-commerce as an important contributor to the development of China's economy and therefore worthy of support to ensure its expansion. …
undercut existing e-commerce providers and monopolise the market in order to gain massive leverage over tariffs and the like. With western consumer manufacturing practically non existent governments either say "how high" or face riots on the streets, Either suits Bejing.
A business model laid out in the "history" section of your ever closing library under "what the British did", and "What the British did next".
It’s just the natural evolution of leveraging small consignment tax breaks and International Postal Rates and bollocks to the environmental impact of eCom from SE Asia.
In a previous incarnation it was called Tesco Jersey (other low value consignment tax dodgers were available) … through all manner of eBay tat directly from China/Hong Kong.
https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2010/apr/13/tesco-revives-jersey-vat-avoidance
Lately amazon is quite bad: search filters/sorting not working, lots-of-crap(TM), not cheap not cheaper, dark patterns for prime subscription (depending on country) but temu lower the bar quite a bit.
Try searching for anything like (curtain rail, LED ceiling light, etc.) the results are always the same no matter how much you try to narrow down by being specific.
I guess the limited selection is related to their scheme to skip paying import duties, but I have no evidence of that.
I tried to buy something several times; unless you don't care about finding a good price or finding the item you actually need, it's very hard to justify making a purchase there
I would never buy from Amazon, but I've noticed eBay doing much the same; degrading the quality of search results and removing more and more filtering options. For example it's no longer possible to filter results geographically, resulting in dozens of pages of exactly the same item from Chinese sellers. It's a dreadful user experience, which surely cannot be unintentional - though I struggle to understand the reasoning. The only search option that makes it remotely possible to still use eBay is to filter by "condition: used". And no, this does not seem to be related to Brexshit - the same is true for all eBay sites, including US, Germany and France. Does anyone have a reasonable explanation for what's going on with this!?
It's meant to garner interest in other non-related items. They don't care that you are searching for a very specific item, they want to put other tat in front of your eyes on the odd change it will make you want to buy it!
Ali Express is the same way. I even get push notifications from Ali express about an item and when you touch the notification it shows you a page with items totally unrelated to the item in the push notification. Their search is terrible.
I've seen a few youtubers who do outdoors stuff (camping, hiking etc) testing their gear, which is how I first heard of Temu and various other similar sites. It's a common type of video for youtubers though, regardless of their niche. James Hoffmann has done a few "buy all the coffee things" from a site videos as well, which are usually entertaining even if there's nothing you'd want to buy yourself.
China has a plentiful supply of willing* slaves to employ in manufacturing and testing** cheap crap. That's why they want more Temus. They can afford to do it. And all the while, they're pumping up their already massive economy. The trouble is that as inflation takes hold in China and the price of everything rises, the only thing they'll have left to do is use more and more forced labour.
*Uyghurs aren't exactly willing, but the Chinese government use them for forced labour anyway.
**"Testing" is a technical term for faking a test certificate used within the Temu universe.