Is Temu Shopping Legit? Read about this shopping app before you place an order.

Pedro Vega
3 min readAug 29, 2023

--

What is Temu?

Temu is an online-shopping megastore that offers just about any product you can imagine. You can buy car accessories, clothing, small home appliances, outdoor furniture, power tools, baby clothes, and everything in between

Temu means “team up, price down.” It reflects the company’s mission to leverage economies of scale to lower its prices for customers.

Temu’s stand-out feature is that many of the site’s products are incredibly cheap. You can buy sunglasses for $2, necklaces for $1, and glow-in-the-dark pet collars for $3. In fact, whatever you can think of is probably on Temu for less than $30.

Some people compare Temu to sites like Shein, Wish, and AliExpress, but Temu is a little different. Shein primarily focuses on fashion and clothing items, while Temu could be compared to Amazon, as an array of items are available on Temu.

Temu offers steep discounts on a slew of products, mostly shipped directly from Chinese factories or warehouses. In addition to incredibly low prices, Temu can no doubt attribute its popularity to its strategy of giving free stuff to users who promote the app on their social networks and get friends and family to sign up.

Temu has experienced rapid growth in its product offerings, now encompassing a wide range of merchandise across 30 primary categories and over 250 subcategories. They now offer diverse items such as apparel, kitchen and homeware products, electronics, and even pet supplies.

Temu is very much a real platform, offering a variety of real, heavily discounted products, from air fryers to wireless Lenovo earbuds ($8.98), computer keyboards ($15) to clothes ($1.69 for five pairs of socks). Users who turned to Temu this month as a lifeline for holiday shopping in the face of the highest inflation in a generation made it one of the fastest growing platforms in the U.S.

Take a look at TEMU’s actual prices

What can you buy in Temu?

Users on the Temu website or app are immediately besieged by deals of all kinds: running shoes for $17.48, universal wrenches for $4.48, talking toy hamsters for $6.99. A banner brags about items up to 90% off retail prices, thanks to a new year’s sale. The breadth of items and prices is remarkable, and the site’s aesthetic comes off as something like a virtual dollar store.

While Temu’s prices are cheap, many new customers actually aren’t paying anything at all. That’s because Temu has launched a campaign on social media in which the more you convince others to sign up, the more credit you earn. This has enabled some people who have earned enough credit to receive home goods without even giving Temu their credit card information.

Get free stuff.

“It seems like they’re being subsidized to be a loss leader in order to gain market share, which is not unlike what Amazon did for a long time,” says Douglas Schmidt, a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University.

Brianna Lukey, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas, says she’s received $200 worth of items from Temu for free. She first heard about the app from a friend a month ago, and was initially leery of it: “I know there’s a lot of things that go around that may not be legit,” she says. “But this was.”

To sum up, Temu is a legitimate e-commerce platform that offers genuine cash rewards. Upon thorough evaluation, it is apparent that Temu provides affordable and quality products due to its innovative Next-Generation Manufacturing (NGM) model. You can confidently shop on Temu and get the chance to win free money or items. Enjoy your shopping experience and happy saving on Temu!

Take a look at TEMU’s actual prices

--

--