Say what you may of Temu, and I do think more vetting of certain goods is a good idea, but they fill a very real need. In the part of Europe where I live, the choice is only between intermediaries for the same products coming from China. The local intermediaries sell a very limited picking at staggering margins. And when it comes to certain things, like electronic components, the choice is between importing (old) American stock with a German company as the intermediary, and that's $$$$ and many weeks of shipping, or using Temu or Aliexpress.
There's something unpleasantly snobbish with the way business is done here, a spirit of "if you have to ask the price, our business is not for you". For example, in Instagram, "Local offerings" pop up all the time in the feed. The ones which are truly local end up in a "call us to know more" button, no pricing info disclosed. The ones that show actual prices tend to be shell companies with no employees, no doubt a thin wrapper around an importer from Asia.
Yup. I've even had an (Amazon rather than Temu) power-strip-and-USB combo noticeably sparking and tripping the apartment circuit breakers when plugged in just 6 months after purchase.
Could we interest you in some amazons choice fuses? never more be concerned about replacing a fuse! as these ones, simply wont need replacing! (they survive 5-10x their rated current)
I think the line should be much earlier than that. But even with this very thin line, like the parent said, the deficient products are everywhere. Just look at the recalls in any major store here (Carrefour, Action, Leclerc). And that's for the main brands/distributors, go into any bazaar or market and you'll find the exact same products you find on Aliexpress/Temu, but with 10x price markup, like the parent said.
Don't get me wrong. I think companies should be held to higher standards: i just don't understand why only Temu is being held responsible of the entire broken capitalist system.
There are generally two ways governments hold companies accountable for dangerous products.
The first is liability. If they're selling chargers that burn down houses, they get sued, and they don't want to get sued, so they don't want to sell chargers that burn down houses.
The second is regulatory requirements. This one is generally worse. The incumbents capture the regulators to e.g. have the law require their technology or raise costs to exclude new entrants. The rules are often inefficient or poorly conceived with bad cost/benefit ratios. And companies making products that are dangerous but nevertheless comply with the rules will point to their checkbox compliance to dodge liability.
The problem with the first one is that it doesn't work well against companies outside the jurisdiction, because then you can't sue them, and the importer will be a small entity that just files for bankruptcy if you try to sue them. But the second one has the exact same problem. They sell products that don't comply with the rules; if you try to fine them they're outside the jurisdiction and the only thing in the jurisdiction is a fungible importer that will dissolve if you try to go after them.
In that environment the thing that actually works is the third thing. Customers expect some products to be dangerous and rely on product reviews to determine which ones. But this is the thing the second one inhibits, because then overpriced incumbents use their influence over the laws to target any new supplier that tries to establish a trusted brand, which causes the foreign suppliers to have to sell through dozens of unknown labels so they can continue to dissolve them if any of them get prosecuted. And then customers are stuck choosing between the overpriced incumbents and the far cheaper foreign suppliers that may or may not be safe, with many people risking the latter because they have so much lower margins.
If you ban Temu chargers, people will go to stores to buy the cheapest ones which are identical to the ones on Temu, just for 10x the price.
Edit: Reply to Scroll_Swe as I am rate-limited to posting new comments. The chargers in budget stores are identical to Temu chargers are are frequently recalled.
At least in the UK, the main high-street retailers will only stock goods from reputable brands with a (relatively) decent track record and safety standards. I don't believe there is any intersection between products sold on Temu and e.g. Argos, John Lewis.
Not in The Netherlands. Plenty of stores that stock chargers identical to the ones on AliExpress and Temu. Action, Big Bazar, SoLow.
Edit: Reply to lozenge as I am still rate-limited by HN. Some of them get recalled, the vast majority of them are still being sold and could burn your house down.
A major retailer in my country had to recall thousands of units of kids kinetic sand because it contained asbestos. Are you saying we'd be better off had they not been made to recall these? Or that we'd be worse off had there been more regulation preventing kids from inhaling asbestos in the first place?
It's all fun and games until your neighbour in a terraced house or apartment building unwittingly starts an uncontrollable battery fire. Electric scooters and those 'hoover boards' from a few years ago are notorious when it comes to that, but plenty of underspecced small electronics will fail spectacularly.
I know your mileage may vary in different areas of Europe but in Italy and Spain you'll find a plethora of random general stores that resell Aliexpress sorts of goods at a very low markup over direct ordering. The stock variety is obviously more limited but those stores are amazing and fit a really key need.
Most of the ones I'm thinking of are just corner stores - it's not a brand or chain to my knowledge. An example might be Bazar Gran Puerto, El Puerto de Sta Maria, CA, ES.
yes, i'm very in favor of the shift towards direct-to-consumer among chinese retailers, but that might be because i'm not actually all that sympathetic to small business
I recently bought some custom-built pool lighting directly from the manufacturer in Ningbo, and I have to say, the sales, delivery, and customer support I received was top notch. Their representatives were fluent in English and competent, the product quality was excellent (yes, I carefully inspected it upon receipt because it's going into water), and the entire process from measurement to delivery was fast and smooth. And, of course, the price was right.
I'm not all that sympathetic to small businesses that exist functionally as drop shippers for the same products with the same absence of support. Much in the same way I roll my eyes and go to 7/11 over the cute "local" markets that are supplied by the same suppliers nationwide, and you end up in a shiplap-walled coffee shop with $8 bags of chips that could exist anywhere.
Small businesses that do the work of curating a niche item, doing QA work that's absent on the shipments from china, and then offering much stronger aftermarket support/replacement/repair? That is often worth a (substantial) premium over wondering if the item showing up in a month is going to work as intended.
There is totally a market for a global website which instead of shipping goods direct from China by plane instead has local warehouses 1 per city and can deliver to your house within a few hours by motorbike.
Aka like Amazon but with much smaller margins.
The savings would come from the fact sea freight is so much cheaper than air freight.
My reaction to this sentiment is that they fill the same need in Europe as Uber did in the USA. They found a way to operate in a market while avoiding its regulations and are therefor able to offer much lower prices as their competitors who still follow the regulations.
Europe has historically had pretty strict consumer protection laws, and ever since the end of the Cold War these consumer protection laws have been slowly chipped away. When I was a kid for example companies were not allowed to target children in their marketing material. When American media became predominant in the continent, instead of enforcing our own consumer protection laws against American advertisers, regulators just ignored it and allowed it to proliferate, effectively making ads targeting children legal in the continent. Regulators have been showing the exact same inaction towards Chinese retailers breaking our own laws as they did towards American advertisers three decades ago. I foresee that consumer safety laws getting the same fate as the ban on ads targeting children.
There is some validity to a marketplace selling items from a larger range of retailers, however the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.
> the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.
There are some that are genuinely dangerous and bad for society, but there are tons of goods that are "the same thing but half the price because it lasts a quarter the time" that have genuine utility.
Harbor Freight has basically made a drop-shipping business out of it. I often have tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times.
Copy that over a bunch of verticals and it starts to make sense. Clothing for a costume I'll wear maybe twice, niche cooking gadgets for very specific things, tools to do a one-time repair on a car, a flash drive to turn over photos to family members, yada yada.
I think the dirty secret is that a lot of it is not "1/2 the price that lasts 1/4 the time" but "1/4 the price that lasts 9/10 the time" or "1/2 the price for the exact same product without half of the budget going to marketing".
It's not all of it. Some things are seriously worse quality. But really a ton of the "better quality" is just better marketing.
> some that are genuinely dangerous ... tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times
Forehead hit hood, but I caught myself so it was a "gentle" reminder instead of a concussion. I should have splurged that time I broke a socket tightening an axle bolt. 150 ft-lbs + 180 degrees is a fair bit of torque.
Yea, worst is the retail people who clearly hated Temu/Aliexpress etc because they stand no chance at competing with them when they sell the same things but at 10 times the cost (I don’t blame them. Sucks for them) but instead of just saying the truth that they hate the competition they just make up these fake reasons ”oh it’s low quality stuff that will break” when it’s clearly the same stuff from the same factories etc.
There is a part of conservatism and resistance to change. Online commerce has been seen as "suspicious" by some from the beginning to the point that in, for instance, France free delivery of books is banned... of course this just means that amazon.fr charges 1 cent, instead but it is symptomatic of a state of mind.
I downvote comments like this, since they make the comment useless. No-one can vouch for or argue against the comment when it's some "part" of a continent of over 40 countries.
Taobao and Temu are great. The quality is not always amazing, but the prices are low and many sellers even offer customisation.
In Australia, the product selection is often limited, and a lot of local stores are just reselling Chinese-made products with huge markups anyway. At that point, you may as well order directly from China and save money.
The EU's approach to imports from PRoC is the regulatory equivalent of trying to 'test your way to quality' (which Deming showed to be nearly impossible). Attempts to use regulatory fines and prosecutions to ensure compliance from PRoC products is a whack-a-mole exercise which will fail.
Passing the CE certification is annoying, but hardly a significant cost compared to design of the product. Notably, the law forces companies to put their ass on the line if things to wrong, by registering their name to the product they produce.
We also have laws making the store selling the thing that burnt down your house liable for what they sold, which make them think twice about selling a random off-brand fire-starter with unknown manufacturer. This worked great until Temu, Amazon, and Alibaba entered the market claiming to be "marketplaces" connecting "importers to suppliers" while clearly behaving like a store.
The core issue is that, if the producer cannot be sued, the seller cannot be sued, then there is no reason to follow any safety what-so-ever. So fine the distributor until they put some quality control or standards on the producers they give market to, may solve the issue.
The US has this issue as well, though more focus on individuals suing for each case rather than broad-spectrum compliance regulation. The outcome is the same; with nobody to sue, there is no reason to make things safe for human use.
CE is the least of the issues, and is indeed relatively low-cost for mass-market consumer goods, (this is not true for niche products,) when it is taken into account in the original product design.
From my perspective (as a non-resident EU citizen), it seems the EU is addicted to cheap products from PRoC which do not comply with a variety of EU regulations, because actually enforcing compliance would drive up consumer prices, which is politically unacceptable. This also seems like the reason of the lackadaisical enforcement of regulations.
Essentially, allowing in PRoC products, then complaining is an easy way to keep prices low while continuing to introduce regulations which are expensive to comply with.
I've been done by illegal electronics on Amazon too many times. They don't seem to care at all. You can still buy chargers on them that are in an advisory red list on gov UK....
€200M accounts for roughly 1.6% of their €12.3B net profit in 2025.
The average EU salary is €39,808. It's equivalent to a €636 fine. Though this is based on income, not net profit so it's actually more impactful to the average person than to Temu.
Most people would find being fined a week's wages significant. It's not what they'd expect to get for, say, murder, but worse than any parking fine and enough that they'd give serious consideration to not doing whatever they did again.
Depends how much you made doing the activity you got fined for. Temu says the fine is disproportionate (of course) but I'd be surprised if they made actually less than 200M selling such goods over the years. Ideally it should be several multiples of what was truly made, otherwise it's just a bet you might not get caught or, in the worst case, a loan until you are fined.
Sure but this €200m fine is just the first fine. Its the first hit of the stick. It isn't meant to be crippling - it's just mean to be serious enough that they take action to avoid future fines, which might be a lot bigger.
These sort of calculations are always missing a simple fact that no company on earth, not even Apple or Google shrugs off a 200M fine, no matter how little it is of their entire operating budget. It's the kind of money that gets people fired, even if it made no difference to the bottom line.
2. Who cares if somebody gets fired for PR purposes? Especially with a severance that will make sure that their great-grandchildren will never have to work and your great-grandchildren will be paying them rent?
Everybody doing tens of billions of $ of business shrugs off a $200M fine. They might even get a bonus and a plaque for coming up with a scam that lasted so long before it blew up.
The theory is that this won't be the only fine if Temu doesn't fix this. So yes, a slap on the fingers, but the fines should grow bigger if Temu doesn't address this.
> while French President Emmanuel Macron even suggested following US-style measures akin to the "Section 301" tariffs.
> A major source of this latest wave of the so-called "China shock" narrative is the claim that the EU's trade deficit with China reached 360 billion euros in 2025.
These are the same people whose collective knickers are getting in a twist over Trump, mind you.
From Claude: The €200 million penalty equals around 0.4% of the global turnover reported last year by Temu's parent company PDD Holdings.
According to Eurostat, the average gross annual salary in the EU is around €39,800 per year for full-time employment. The average net salary comes to roughly €2,461 per month, or about €29,500 net per year.
0.4% of an average worker's gross annual salary = roughly €159.
The fine is for activity in the EU, so compare it to their business there. Comparing apples to advertisement fliers is useful only if you are using the fliers as toilet paper substitutes.
This news has been circulating on the internet for a long time and it is indeed real, but the question is, if people want to buy something, they will look for alternatives.
There’s zero demand for products that are hiding safety issues that nobody was seeking out (e.g., toys with lead paint, batteries that explode)
Demand for illegal things isn’t in a vacuum. It’s hard to enact prohibition on alcohol or cannabis (extremely easy to produce) versus prohibiting something more complicated to make, difficult to smuggle, or less desirable to buy.
If my government bans Crocs am I going to go through the engineering effort to make them myself? Plus, if I go outside the cops will see my illegal Crocs very quickly. I have plenty of alternatives to Crocs and most of them are better. Most likely, I won’t even think about the ban.
We have a good example with incandescent light bulbs. I don’t know anyone who has attempted to violate the ban on home incandescent light bulbs.
The whole “everything should be legal anyway because there will always be a black market” philosophy is not a universal truth and we need to stop assuming that it makes sense.
> We have a good example with incandescent light bulbs. I don’t know anyone who has attempted to violate the ban on home incandescent light bulbs.
Funny, because I remember that when this ban was first introduced in my country there actually was a black market for incandescent light bulbs. Some stores would keep selling them as “special purpose” or “vibration-resistant”. It only ended when LED bulbs appeared on the market, because they are strictly superior product (not like fluorescent ones EU tried to promote earlier)
If people want to be healthy and live, they wouldn't smoke, drink, use meth, gamble, etc. What the people might rationally want, is not what drives the market. The infamous invisible hand is just addiction.
It seems like quite a light punishment for selling such dangerous products that could literally kill people. The dodgy e-bike batteries have already been linked to several fires.
bigclivedotcom takes apart some of the Temu stuff on YouTube and some of the electronics is atrocious.
They sell adapters to turn oil cans into silencers. Each one should be a violation of the National Firearms Act and subject to up to a half million dollar fine https://www.atf.gov/media/25071/download Nota bened; these are not per-se illegal, but you need to sell them through a firearms dealer and pay for an ATF tax stamp and only in states that have not banned them/all NFA items.
This. Same for the Chinese mainland app, some wild stuff like that being sold (firearms are highly regulated, but 1:1 copies seem to be ok, maybe because of the high level of regulation?)
But western brands can be sued or made liable with fines when a house burns down, which force them a minimum level of caution or risk-assessment when designing and selling their product. A random Chinese drop-shipper that vanish into smoke cannot, so all we can do is force the distributor take that responsibility in their place.
So Temu should be sued if a house burns down from a generic-brand e-bike that they imported and took money for.
… which found that a high percentage of chargers purchased through Temu failed basic electrical safety tests. It also found that a high proportion of baby toys posed safety risks, containing chemicals above legal limits or featuring small detachable parts that presented suffocation hazards…
Boring. I can probably find the exact same on Amazon. From the headline, I was hoping the list of illegal products was going to be something like enriched plutonium, RPGs, Lawn Darts, etc
Maybe for marketplace articles shipped from outside the EU. It's not legal, so Amazon will surely have a close look (for directly sold items), as well as any company shipping from within the EU.
I once bought one of those cheap portable consoles from them (or Aliexpress) and after two month I was given a full refund as the welding of the motherboard contained too much lead.
This news really doesn't surprise me that much.
Every major PRoC company is required to have CCP ties; in addition to 'paying for facilitation' by local officials, a certain percentage of their employees must be CCP members.
Ties as in pay tax to ccp. In China Temu is called pinduoduo (拼多多）and you can buy some wild stuff there, the regulation on mainland seems also pretty lax i mean.
Sorry, ties, as CCP party committees inside private firms. And in case of Temu, it also has a data-sharing agreement with People's Daily [1], a CCP controlled media group.
Just image having a mandatory political party inside every American corporation which the board has no control over.
I would even go further and say that the term really has to be almost "equal" - equal access, equal rules, equal legislation or the market isn't really free.
The past making quality clothing was difficult, cutting it right, sourcing the right patterns designs materials, stitching it took care etc. In our world making quality clothing should be easy with all the technology but what we see in bad quality that you wash a few times and it is trash. It is uglier designs than in the past etc. It makes no sense. It is like a conspiracy where people don't want to sell quality clothes at a fair price. Like all companies got together and decided we will sell crap clothes at cheap prices and good clothes at extortion prices. There is zero correlation with actual costs.
With a few exceptions, those labels do not mean that the product has actually been tested or actually complies with the standard. They are a self-certification: CE means “I promise this complies with European norms”, but the entity deciding to print that on a product may not be honest. Small fly-by-night operations on the other side of the planet have little incentive to be honest.
Generally speaking, international direct-to-consumer e-commerce is a problem for trying to enforce these kinds of rules. The whole model of checks at the border works well for massive bulk shipments, which not only are few enough in number that customs have a chance of doing a proper job on them, but there's also a commercial importer taking a large financial risk on the shipment and therefore 1) having an incentive to ensure they import something safe to begin with, 2) they can be practically fined/sued by authorities if they screw up. But when you have myriad tiny operations selling direct to consumers, the consumer is the importer, and there's no local representative for the manufacturer that you can actually sue. It's effectively a quite lawless area. Being able to do direct imports is an important freedom, and this kind of laxity is inevitable, but it's understandable the EU wants to do something about the flood of poor-quality goods that are terrible for fair competition, the environment, and health and safety.
> Are you suggesting opening every package to check for a CE?
In the old days, when an importer purchased Chinese goods in bulk and resold them, import checks were commonplace.... AND the importer was legally responsible for paying import duties and selling goods to the public that were legal and met safety standards.
Now that any individual can order direct from China (with cheap subsidised postage!), the floodgates of untaxed and dangerous shite are open.
One solution is to address the subsidised postage that makes this state of affairs possible.
That’s unworkable: asking a recipient unfamiliar with producers to know whether producer is reputable or not in advance and if the producer is unscrupulous you expect every affected buyer to follow up or be in violation of importation laws?
So consumers should just pay for a random import company to ”pinky promise” that it is safe? It is well known that most of the crap that is CE hasn’t actually gone through a million euro testing program. It’s just a stamp. And if something happens then well that LLC goes bankrupt (but odds are low)
I think thats asking much from people some of whom easily get scammed by phone banks in Eastern Europe, India etc. many people will not put in that effort.
I see, the issue is those parcels are mailed directly, not from a logistics operation already inside EU borders.
In my country the government is pushing those companies to have local warehouses. So if items are bulk imported by the marketplace, in theory it should be easier to inspect.
I think the parent is questioning how the fine relates to removing the goods from circulation?
Or is the intention of the law to allow for an unlimited number of supposedly illegal goods to circulate freely within the EU, just fined appropriately?
There is such a thing. The Chinese Export one was specifically created to intentionally be confusable with the real CE marking (Conformité Européenne). And it works exactly as intended. People see “CE” and think it’s the real CE one but it’s the intentionally confusable one.
It really isn't. There is no official "Chinese Export" mark. And it's legal to use the real CE mark just to indicate that you (the manufacturer) believe the product complies with European regulations. Some manufacturers might not know or care what it means and just put it on anyway. And some manufacturers might put a version with the incorrect dimensions on their product. It still doesn't mean "Chinese Export".
This gets parroted all the time, but I have never seen any proof that this is actually true. It's always this one image comparing the two, but never any real example. It's just unreliable sources copying from each other.
There is a conspiracy theory for everyone it seems, even for the educated. No there is no "legitimate" Chinese-mandated CE that can ever be allowed in EU. It would completely destroy the trade relationship and cause Chinese underwriter labs to be completely banned from ever testing for CE marks.
HOWEVER, there are a lot of fake CE marks printed by dodgy companies who make the same shitty products that gets imported via Temu. They are already in the business of selling contraband and dangerous factory seconds, no need for conspiracies to give a legitimate twist to their contraband business.
It's not enough, I routinely order things with obvious fake labels or sometimes things I know ahead are clearly not CE compliant, and most packages can't be open due to the large amount, until we have robot warehouses, I don't think is solvable.
Yup, CE is self-declatory. To prove it, you need to actually check the documentation from the manufacturer's web page. Usually there are numbers for individual tests on the product.
Laws are as good as they are enforced. With millions of widgets entering every day, most being very low cost, there's very little point in going one by one checking if they comply.
For electronics without wireless functionality, it is allowed to self-certify. Anyone could also print whatever label they want on their products illegally (i.e. without doing the required paperwork to self-certify).
The policemen controlling imports don't have the competency to check for faults, so we get this situation where specialists regularly sample the products, and heavy fines are issued to the importer.
And for electronics with wireless, they still just ignore everything. No FCC ID, don't even have any silkscreening on the pcb or markings on the ICs. Nothing gets enforced.
It’s not simply difficult, it’s an existential threat to their current business model.
Unless I’m missing something obvious, enforcing regulatory compliance from the army of hustlers that is their vendor market would be expensive or impossible.
Feels like the EU is always going to find something to fine you over. Think of it as a tax. The purpose is compensating for the lack of notable domestic tech giants.
That's the thing with these fines. 19/20 times they make a lot of sense. But even so, there will be people saying "but why not this other org" to which the answer is "Yes! Hand out more fines", not "it's unfair, so just let everyone break the law".
The EU began enforcing a small parcel tax directly against Temu last May [0] and France has been strongly lobbying against Shein and Temu [1]. The EU has also made Chinese overproduction a critical topic of discussion for EU-China relations [2][3], and barring Temu and Shein is backed by both unions and industrial groups within Europe [4].
All of this is linking to the EU's strategy of playing hardball against Chinese support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine [5][6], as well as pushing back against the Chinese perception that the EU is a has-been [7] as well as conducting an active info-war against a European state [8].
europe can copy a lot of what made china a superpower (not the weak labor rights obviously). subsidize everything and build up state owned factories. that will end unemployment and make eu products cheaper. no need to be all protectionist
It's a cultural thing yeah. Americans genuinely do on the whole think that their approach is better. The good news I guess is that if you're an American and you think "Well I don't" you can (at least for now†) just leave.
† If you lived in the German Democratic Republic (aka "East Germany") in 1950 you could literally just walk to West Germany, by 1961 all other borders are closed and fenced and in Berlin the Wall is up and people who try to escape are being executed routinely. This didn't happen instantly over night, but it took about a decade to go from routine to "Vast majority of people who attempt it are killed".
I mean, in America we have similar regulations. Toys aren't allowed to burn down houses or poison babies. You have to get dietary supplements if you want to poison babies.
Enforcement on individually shipped imports is hard regardless of where you are. Traditionally enforcement is through spot checks of bulk imports, and leaning hard on the importer who has a clear nexus.
There's something unpleasantly snobbish with the way business is done here, a spirit of "if you have to ask the price, our business is not for you". For example, in Instagram, "Local offerings" pop up all the time in the feed. The ones which are truly local end up in a "call us to know more" button, no pricing info disclosed. The ones that show actual prices tend to be shell companies with no employees, no doubt a thin wrapper around an importer from Asia.
https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU
Don't get me wrong. I think companies should be held to higher standards: i just don't understand why only Temu is being held responsible of the entire broken capitalist system.
The first is liability. If they're selling chargers that burn down houses, they get sued, and they don't want to get sued, so they don't want to sell chargers that burn down houses.
The second is regulatory requirements. This one is generally worse. The incumbents capture the regulators to e.g. have the law require their technology or raise costs to exclude new entrants. The rules are often inefficient or poorly conceived with bad cost/benefit ratios. And companies making products that are dangerous but nevertheless comply with the rules will point to their checkbox compliance to dodge liability.
The problem with the first one is that it doesn't work well against companies outside the jurisdiction, because then you can't sue them, and the importer will be a small entity that just files for bankruptcy if you try to sue them. But the second one has the exact same problem. They sell products that don't comply with the rules; if you try to fine them they're outside the jurisdiction and the only thing in the jurisdiction is a fungible importer that will dissolve if you try to go after them.
In that environment the thing that actually works is the third thing. Customers expect some products to be dangerous and rely on product reviews to determine which ones. But this is the thing the second one inhibits, because then overpriced incumbents use their influence over the laws to target any new supplier that tries to establish a trusted brand, which causes the foreign suppliers to have to sell through dozens of unknown labels so they can continue to dissolve them if any of them get prosecuted. And then customers are stuck choosing between the overpriced incumbents and the far cheaper foreign suppliers that may or may not be safe, with many people risking the latter because they have so much lower margins.
Edit: Reply to Scroll_Swe as I am rate-limited to posting new comments. The chargers in budget stores are identical to Temu chargers are are frequently recalled.
Edit: Reply to lozenge as I am still rate-limited by HN. Some of them get recalled, the vast majority of them are still being sold and could burn your house down.
In EU, if you buy Temu, you are the importer and you become responsible for CE marking breaches etc. 0 help for you.
*My bad this USED TO be the case but not anymore apparently
The line should be drawn by parents.
The paternalism really has gone too far,
and people are (incorrectly and dangerously) expecting to be protected now.
Consumer standards are a net benefit to society.
> and people are (incorrectly and dangerously) expecting to be protected now.
The general public hasn’t the faintest idea how to differentiate between a safe product and an unsafe one, and they shouldn’t have to
The problem being that a marketplace platform with millions of small sellers has no reasonable way to do this either.
but, you’re only going to achieve moving the cheapo builders stateside where they’re easier to enforce on.
That race to the bottom isn’t going anywhere - if someone can save a grand half-heartedly wrapping their own packs, they’re going to.
[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Nederland
it’s a problem of allowing the collapse of your own civilization?
Small businesses that do the work of curating a niche item, doing QA work that's absent on the shipments from china, and then offering much stronger aftermarket support/replacement/repair? That is often worth a (substantial) premium over wondering if the item showing up in a month is going to work as intended.
Aka like Amazon but with much smaller margins.
The savings would come from the fact sea freight is so much cheaper than air freight.
There’s a reason the likes of Aldi and Lidl have limited product choice.
Europe has historically had pretty strict consumer protection laws, and ever since the end of the Cold War these consumer protection laws have been slowly chipped away. When I was a kid for example companies were not allowed to target children in their marketing material. When American media became predominant in the continent, instead of enforcing our own consumer protection laws against American advertisers, regulators just ignored it and allowed it to proliferate, effectively making ads targeting children legal in the continent. Regulators have been showing the exact same inaction towards Chinese retailers breaking our own laws as they did towards American advertisers three decades ago. I foresee that consumer safety laws getting the same fate as the ban on ads targeting children.
There are some that are genuinely dangerous and bad for society, but there are tons of goods that are "the same thing but half the price because it lasts a quarter the time" that have genuine utility.
Harbor Freight has basically made a drop-shipping business out of it. I often have tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times.
Copy that over a bunch of verticals and it starts to make sense. Clothing for a costume I'll wear maybe twice, niche cooking gadgets for very specific things, tools to do a one-time repair on a car, a flash drive to turn over photos to family members, yada yada.
It's not all of it. Some things are seriously worse quality. But really a ton of the "better quality" is just better marketing.
Forehead hit hood, but I caught myself so it was a "gentle" reminder instead of a concussion. I should have splurged that time I broke a socket tightening an axle bolt. 150 ft-lbs + 180 degrees is a fair bit of torque.
Anything that unpredictably dumps large amounts of kinetic energy on failure is one of those.
I had a buddy that bought the tool for getting car suspension springs on from Harbor Freight, and I definitely wouldn't roll those dice.
There was a time where society didn't buy clothes to only wear once or twice but would instead rent them for those occasions.
https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/amazon-is-wrong-to-use-...
I downvote comments like this, since they make the comment useless. No-one can vouch for or argue against the comment when it's some "part" of a continent of over 40 countries.
The clothes are all 100% plastic polyester shit with extra chemicals. If you have proof of otherwise, show me.
Yes I make enough to buy good clothes. If I REALLY need cheap clothes H&M basics are always there.
Same with anything else, IT and tech parts I shop in Sweden.
What else?
Like, what is so needed now that you did not need before but you need to buy plastic China crap from Temu now?
In Australia, the product selection is often limited, and a lot of local stores are just reselling Chinese-made products with huge markups anyway. At that point, you may as well order directly from China and save money.
It also saves 10% GST.
We also have laws making the store selling the thing that burnt down your house liable for what they sold, which make them think twice about selling a random off-brand fire-starter with unknown manufacturer. This worked great until Temu, Amazon, and Alibaba entered the market claiming to be "marketplaces" connecting "importers to suppliers" while clearly behaving like a store.
The core issue is that, if the producer cannot be sued, the seller cannot be sued, then there is no reason to follow any safety what-so-ever. So fine the distributor until they put some quality control or standards on the producers they give market to, may solve the issue.
The US has this issue as well, though more focus on individuals suing for each case rather than broad-spectrum compliance regulation. The outcome is the same; with nobody to sue, there is no reason to make things safe for human use.
From my perspective (as a non-resident EU citizen), it seems the EU is addicted to cheap products from PRoC which do not comply with a variety of EU regulations, because actually enforcing compliance would drive up consumer prices, which is politically unacceptable. This also seems like the reason of the lackadaisical enforcement of regulations.
Essentially, allowing in PRoC products, then complaining is an easy way to keep prices low while continuing to introduce regulations which are expensive to comply with.
So what else are you going to do? Paperwork up front for every single product?
That's basically how drugs won the war on drugs, yes.
The average EU salary is €39,808. It's equivalent to a €636 fine. Though this is based on income, not net profit so it's actually more impactful to the average person than to Temu.
https://themorningnews.com/news/2025/10/13/temu-doubles-eu-p...
1. It's not, and
2. Who cares if somebody gets fired for PR purposes? Especially with a severance that will make sure that their great-grandchildren will never have to work and your great-grandchildren will be paying them rent?
Everybody doing tens of billions of $ of business shrugs off a $200M fine. They might even get a bonus and a plaque for coming up with a scam that lasted so long before it blew up.
Again, that's not how it works, although I know people have this romanticized view of big companies casually shrugging off 200M fines like nothing.
>>They might even get a bonus and a plaque for coming up with a scam that lasted so long before it blew up.
Again, cool idea for a book, but doesn't happen in reality. No one gets a pat on the back and a bonus for being fined 200M.
This is also part of the EU's larger tariffs against China [3].
[0] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1361926.shtml
[1] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1362200.shtml
[2] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1362161.shtml
[3] - https://www.ft.com/content/e28fe696-ac30-4543-a105-febc82789...
Ahah, China going Adam Smith on the EU.
Peacefully, so far. Let's hope they don't go "opium war" on free trade.
> A major source of this latest wave of the so-called "China shock" narrative is the claim that the EU's trade deficit with China reached 360 billion euros in 2025.
These are the same people whose collective knickers are getting in a twist over Trump, mind you.
[0] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/01/30/china-traf...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russians-...
According to Eurostat, the average gross annual salary in the EU is around €39,800 per year for full-time employment. The average net salary comes to roughly €2,461 per month, or about €29,500 net per year.
0.4% of an average worker's gross annual salary = roughly €159.
There’s zero demand for products that are hiding safety issues that nobody was seeking out (e.g., toys with lead paint, batteries that explode)
Demand for illegal things isn’t in a vacuum. It’s hard to enact prohibition on alcohol or cannabis (extremely easy to produce) versus prohibiting something more complicated to make, difficult to smuggle, or less desirable to buy.
If my government bans Crocs am I going to go through the engineering effort to make them myself? Plus, if I go outside the cops will see my illegal Crocs very quickly. I have plenty of alternatives to Crocs and most of them are better. Most likely, I won’t even think about the ban.
We have a good example with incandescent light bulbs. I don’t know anyone who has attempted to violate the ban on home incandescent light bulbs.
The whole “everything should be legal anyway because there will always be a black market” philosophy is not a universal truth and we need to stop assuming that it makes sense.
Funny, because I remember that when this ban was first introduced in my country there actually was a black market for incandescent light bulbs. Some stores would keep selling them as “special purpose” or “vibration-resistant”. It only ended when LED bulbs appeared on the market, because they are strictly superior product (not like fluorescent ones EU tried to promote earlier)
If you sell something on your site, or allow users to post something on your site, you should have some liability for the consequences.
But this is an internet store.
bigclivedotcom takes apart some of the Temu stuff on YouTube and some of the electronics is atrocious.
So Temu should be sued if a house burns down from a generic-brand e-bike that they imported and took money for.
Just image having a mandatory political party inside every American corporation which the board has no control over.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/01/...
America is not China, but how close is it getting?
Generally speaking, international direct-to-consumer e-commerce is a problem for trying to enforce these kinds of rules. The whole model of checks at the border works well for massive bulk shipments, which not only are few enough in number that customs have a chance of doing a proper job on them, but there's also a commercial importer taking a large financial risk on the shipment and therefore 1) having an incentive to ensure they import something safe to begin with, 2) they can be practically fined/sued by authorities if they screw up. But when you have myriad tiny operations selling direct to consumers, the consumer is the importer, and there's no local representative for the manufacturer that you can actually sue. It's effectively a quite lawless area. Being able to do direct imports is an important freedom, and this kind of laxity is inevitable, but it's understandable the EU wants to do something about the flood of poor-quality goods that are terrible for fair competition, the environment, and health and safety.
In the old days, when an importer purchased Chinese goods in bulk and resold them, import checks were commonplace.... AND the importer was legally responsible for paying import duties and selling goods to the public that were legal and met safety standards.
Now that any individual can order direct from China (with cheap subsidised postage!), the floodgates of untaxed and dangerous shite are open.
One solution is to address the subsidised postage that makes this state of affairs possible.
The old system of spot inspections worked because most import volume was from known, repeat importers.
In my country the government is pushing those companies to have local warehouses. So if items are bulk imported by the marketplace, in theory it should be easier to inspect.
Or is the intention of the law to allow for an unlimited number of supposedly illegal goods to circulate freely within the EU, just fined appropriately?
https://cemarkingassociation.co.uk/latest-news/ce-marking-an...
https://www.kimuagroup.com/news/differences-between-ce-and-c...
https://starfishmedical.com/resource/conformite-europeenne-m...
HOWEVER, there are a lot of fake CE marks printed by dodgy companies who make the same shitty products that gets imported via Temu. They are already in the business of selling contraband and dangerous factory seconds, no need for conspiracies to give a legitimate twist to their contraband business.
The policemen controlling imports don't have the competency to check for faults, so we get this situation where specialists regularly sample the products, and heavy fines are issued to the importer.
Unless I’m missing something obvious, enforcing regulatory compliance from the army of hustlers that is their vendor market would be expensive or impossible.
I try to a avoid Temu, but they have some good traits, too, like quick and convinient shipping.
I bet you never heard of Microsoft or Google.
Seems fine
The EU began enforcing a small parcel tax directly against Temu last May [0] and France has been strongly lobbying against Shein and Temu [1]. The EU has also made Chinese overproduction a critical topic of discussion for EU-China relations [2][3], and barring Temu and Shein is backed by both unions and industrial groups within Europe [4].
All of this is linking to the EU's strategy of playing hardball against Chinese support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine [5][6], as well as pushing back against the Chinese perception that the EU is a has-been [7] as well as conducting an active info-war against a European state [8].
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/102e18d7-d06b-4405-a347-97bb3c373...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/b1fdbad1-2793-4975-a10b-74bb928d3...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/eu-law...
[3] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20260326IP...
[4] - https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2025/09/15/les-indus...
[5] - https://www.bruegel.org/podcast/how-war-ukraine-reshaping-eu...
[6] - https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2025-01-...
[7] - https://fddi.fudan.edu.cn/_t2515/57/f8/c21257a743416/page.ht...
[8] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...
Ah of course, I do want the state regulating what I can and cannot buy when it comes to junk. Only approved goods should be allowed.
If you don't build nor buy European, you become a vassal of either the US or China.
TEMO will more than likely just pass the cost of this onto EU consumers.
I take it you don't?
† If you lived in the German Democratic Republic (aka "East Germany") in 1950 you could literally just walk to West Germany, by 1961 all other borders are closed and fenced and in Berlin the Wall is up and people who try to escape are being executed routinely. This didn't happen instantly over night, but it took about a decade to go from routine to "Vast majority of people who attempt it are killed".
Enforcement on individually shipped imports is hard regardless of where you are. Traditionally enforcement is through spot checks of bulk imports, and leaning hard on the importer who has a clear nexus.
Good. I want to know my AIEONUS phone charger isn't going to burn my house down and I'm more than happy pay a premium for that knowledge.