Disrupting the market! Temu is named in another country

In addition to the Georgia, Mauritius and Malta stations, news broke recently that Temu has opened its first station in Central Asia - Kazakhstan.

So far, Temu has established 55 overseas sites, covering many countries and regions in Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa and Oceania.

Although it has developed rapidly in overseas markets, the platform has also been criticized. In Europe alone, Temu was investigated by Ireland and Hungary a while ago. Recently, it was named in Germany.

The Federation of German Consumer Organizations ( vzbv) said Temu's operations in the country had a number of non-compliant practices and had issued a warning to the platform.

The VZBV believes that Temu is misleading consumers with seemingly arbitrary discounts, questionable reviews and manipulative designs. The head of the VZBV said that this behavior must stop to prevent consumers from continuing to suffer from such business practices.

At the same time, vzbv also believes that the discounts in Temu's advertisements do not clearly inform consumers how they are generated. And there is "greenwashing" - Temu claims that if consumers deliver the ordered goods to the delivery point instead of their homes, they can reduce their carbon footprint. But when the products are delivered from China to Germany, they have already traveled a long distance.

vzbv also criticized Temu for putting pressure on consumers during the shopping process - such as "Please hurry! More than XXX people have put this product in the shopping cart" or "More than 54 users have made repeated purchases! Why don't you buy 2 at a time?" vzbv believes that this behavior is manipulative design, and the EU's Digital Services Act, passed in February this year, explicitly prohibits this practice.

vzbv also mentioned in its statement that Temu did not provide sufficient information to explain whether the authenticity of the product reviews could be guaranteed and lacked authenticity information about the product suppliers.

vzbv further stated that Temu must stop the above-mentioned behavior, otherwise the next step may be to file a lawsuit against Temu.

Temu responded to these allegations , saying that the updated information on inventory and purchases reflects the true inventory situation and is intended to help consumers make the most appropriate decisions, rather than hyping or "coercing" consumers.

At the same time, Temu also stated that the platform takes the authenticity of all reviews seriously and does not delete or suppress negative reviews; on the contrary, the platform also provides a special mechanism to review sellers and supervise and encourage them to improve the quality of their products and services.

In February this year, European toy manufacturers also criticized the product safety issues on Temu and called for stricter control measures.

Temu

Germany

VxD