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Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

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Re: Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

#671

Post by iLoveOncall »

llm_nerd wrote: post #329
iLoveOncall wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon in the past year and only one got rejected, and quickly approved I corrected one thing that was out of the rules. More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.

>More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience? >They don't suppress any legitimate reviews. While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or…

> Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?

I get them for free, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43690563

> While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.

Most of my reviews are for items with very little reviews due to the nature of Vine, so I can directly see the impact of my score on the average score.

Re: Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

#672

Post by kergonath »

cbeach wrote: post #395
kergonath wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brexit literally just resulted in the UK having lower tariffs That is, of course, entirely false. In that the UK does not, in fact, have lower tariffs, and even if that would be the case, there are many downsides that don’t have anything to do with tariffs. > and a probable free trade deal with the largest economy on the planet The FTA with the US has been "happening soon" for about a decade now. I’ll believe it wh…

> In that the UK does not, in fact, have lower tariffs When tariffs were applied, UK got 10%, EU got 20%. There's currently a temporary reprieve on the EU. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/02/trump-tariff...

They were not applied. Tomorrow, they can be 30% or 5.36%. If your only goal was depending on a fluke and a brain fart of a senile old man 10 years after Brexit was voted, then I don’t need to tell you how poorly thought out it was. If that is your measure of success, then Russia and Belarus welcome you.

Re: Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

#673

Post by Propelloni »

emptysongglass wrote: post #659
emptysongglass wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on now. For consumers , the only thing that's mattered as far as we're concerned is the fact the US had de minimis, which effectively meant no duties paid on all relevant goods a US consumer might want. The EU, on the other hand, has made buying goods from the US, for consumers , horrifically expensive, including reducing the value of non-duty paid goods to essentially zero and leaving it up to EU member countri…

If readers believe I am making false claims, please engage with me. I live in Denmark, as a Dane, and this is what I and any Dane who has bought goods from the US, has experienced directly. The actual, lived experience is far different than whatever any bloc or country may claim (such as being in favor of free trade). The EU has always been economically protectionist, since its birth.

Hey, thanks for pointing de minimis out.

For those not in the know (and too lazy to look it up ;)), de minimis rules for customs duties set a threshold below which no import duties are applied. The de minimis threshold for the USA used to be 800 US$ (and for now continues to be for all but imports from China), the de minimis threshold of the EU is 150 EUR. In other words, if you import goods worth less than 800 US$ into the USA from the EU no duties are applied. If you import goods worth less than 150 EUR from the USA into the EU, no duties are applied.

There is also a tax de minimis, which is a threshold when you have to pay sales and possibly other taxes, e.g. luxury, alcohol and so on. Obviously those taxes differ from country to country in the USA and the EU, and, for example, importing bourbon whiskey into Denmark would be more expensive than into Germany because of the way alcohol is taxed. But the de minimis determines when those taxes even apply. The USA leverages those taxes from a threshold of 800 US$ (again, not any longer for imports from China), while most EU nations set this de minimis threshold to 0.

Merchants usually combine all these costs (duties, taxes, fees, insurances, shipping, etc.) into something called the "landed costs" [0]. Relevant taxes and fees are higher in EU nations than in the USA, which explains most of the differences, but you are quite right, the WTO considers the USA's landing costs fairer than those of most EU nations (Germany is especially bad.) I have no special insights but I guess this is because Intra-EU trading is devoid of duties, fees and taxes (it is a free trade zone after all).

If you want to poke around a little in the various trading nations of the globe, [1] has a nice database available.

So, I do not agree with your conclusion that the EU is a protective lock box, but could improve. Thank you for pointing this aspect out. It is easy to forget about nuance and how complicated and convoluted some of these things can be.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/landed_cost

[1] https://zonos.com/

Re: Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

#674

Post by rstuart4133 »

dingnuts wrote: post #468
zamalek wrote: post #411

I wonder if we can look forward to the end of the letter soup brands on Amazon, it's ridiculously difficult finding real brands in between them. That would be one silver lining in all this mess, at least.

it's the whole point of the tariffs. China does an end run around all of our laws, consumer safety, human rights, workers conditions, intellectual property, all that, and in doing so they cut costs and beat domestic companies at the market. Tariffs are a tax we charge to represent those things they have immorally refused to do while participating in our market. A country can't effectively have things like a minimum w…

> A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.

Australia (I live there) has free trade, a high minimum wage (USD$16/hr) which is strictly enforced, no tariffs to speak of, and used to share the same values as the USA (in the last 100 days no so much). Australia has been that way for decades. In other words: your wrong, despite what "common sense" might tell you.

There are far more glaring examples, like Singapore. Almost no natural resources to exploit, no tariffs to speak of, and a median yearly income of USD$66,000. The USA's median income is USD$40,000.

Now look at countries with high tariffs, or even just "higher than the USA used to have" tariffs. All of them, and I do mean off of them, including China, have living standards well below those with very low tariffs. So you are not just wrong. Empirical evidence says you have it completely arse about.

Re: Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

#675

Post by int_19h »

SoftTalker wrote: post #536
34679 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been short on work, which means I've been poor. I use my off time to work on side projects that I simply could not afford to complete if I paid what US companies charge for tools, components, and custom PCBs. My ability to innovate is seriously impacted by these tarrifs and there is no alternative that I can afford. I recently created something that people in my industry actually want to buy, but I only ordered…

Yeah pretty funny to see mostly the same people calling for a $20+/hr "minimum wage" on one hand, and bemoaning the tarrifs on the other hand. They will tell you that if you can't pay your employees that much, then you don't have a viable business. But they will turn around and whine about how their cheap Chinese crap purchases are now going to cost what a "viable" domestic producer would have to charge.

I'm pretty far to the left, and I'm actually fine with tariffs on China in principle for exactly the reason that you mention. Tangentially, I don't think that "free trade" can ever be meaningfully free when goods flow freely but workers can't move to where the high-paying jobs are - it's a recipe to create market inefficiencies that companies can profit from.

However, the fact of the matter is that our economy as it exists right now relies on cheap goods from China. This can and should be changed, but a meaningful plan to do so would last years of careful incremental changes if the goal is to benefit Americans as a whole. This is emphatically not what this admin is doing.

Re: Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

#676

Post by emptysongglass »

Propelloni wrote: post #673
emptysongglass wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If readers believe I am making false claims, please engage with me. I live in Denmark, as a Dane, and this is what I and any Dane who has bought goods from the US, has experienced directly. The actual, lived experience is far different than whatever any bloc or country may claim (such as being in favor of free trade). The EU has always been economically protectionist, since its birth.

Hey, thanks for pointing de minimis out. For those not in the know (and too lazy to look it up ;)), de minimis rules for customs duties set a threshold below which no import duties are applied. The de minimis threshold for the USA used to be 800 US$ (and for now continues to be for all but imports from China), the de minimis threshold of the EU is 150 EUR. In other words, if you import goods worth less than 800 US$ i…

You've done a good job of explaining the relevant de minimis rules, but you've deflected or minimized the EU's fault.

Inspection fees, duties and taxes make it so functionally no Danish consumer bothers to purchase goods shipped from the US. For Americans to then come rushing to our aid when us poor Europeans are getting a dose of what we've been giving for decades is ironic, to say the least.

Re: Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

#678

Post by qbxk »

constantcrying wrote: post #255
0xEF wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did an experiment for my blog awhile back that never got written up (lack of time, mostly), but it is was just me ordering about $30US of stuff from Temu to see why they were so aggressively marketing themselves, the app auto-installing on my Samsung smartphone I have for work, etc. The experience left me feeling very, very dirty. The items in question were some small fire sticks for camping, a couple of solar port…

I personally am always weary of cheap power banks. Given the rest of the corners cut on the device, how sure are you that the circuitry and the batteries themselves are of acceptable safety standards. Even the batteries in expensive devices can become dangerous and I would assume that those undergo some higher leven of QA, testing and safety standards.

I'm weary of seeing people use weary when they mean wary

Re: Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

#679

Post by bitmasher9 »

kristopolous wrote: post #628
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to find "real brands" if one looks outside of Amazon, Alibaba, etc. Surprisingly, I find I am more pleased with purchases I make outside of Amazon despite all of Amazon's perks. "Platforms" like Amazon and fake "brands" aside, online retailers that only sell "real brands" are still around; they never disappeared despite Amazon's meteoric rise. Many sell through Amazon but also sell outside Amazon, too. Some…

When I went to Shenzhen I found some of these brands with stalls in their vast malls. They're real places. As you walk through you navigate around an obstacle course of dollies, hear endless packing tape and occasionally point out, "oh look, there's Owawuwo, I got a cheap projector from them". Americans can get a Shenzhen-only 5-day Visa on arrival (VOA) from Hong Kong through the Luohu entry at the LoWu station via…

I went a decade ago (on a standard tourist visa, was easy to get but I had to plan far ahead ). It was neat, but I wouldn’t say it’s a must visit, or a top 5 Chinese destination.

The one cool thing was seeing new products at Shenzen, and then a couple months later starting to see those products in American retailers. Seeing the markup and the flow this way really opened my eyes to how the American consumer is exploited.

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