While writing a recent The Tech Effect episode about deceptive app design, I spent time researching a somewhat new online shopping website Temu.
The site is a China-based shopping platform that made its name selling heavily discounted products. The idea is that it offers Chinese vendors a way to sell directly to Western shoppers without a middle person (*cough* except Temu *cough*) and allows them to offer cheaper pricing compared to online platforms like Amazon.
In practice, the service has been reliable so far, and most of my orders showed up extremely quickly.
When I first signed up, I bought a Gamecube extension cable, a pack of Zelda stickers that are real, but you can tell they were made and cut out by hand, which was a little concerning. And finally, a really cheap Wii-to-HDMI adapter that works just as well as other cheap adaptors from Amazon.
After that, I saw an Instagram Reel for a cat brush that also steams your feline friend to keep the hair together, and ordered that. It also works as advertised and only cost $6.
I haven’t bought anything else, but I’ve had my eye on a few other items:
Beyond all this, make sure that when you’re buying tech you don’t fall for deals that feel too good to be true. For example, we’ve seen a ton of deals on SSDs that are under $40 for sizes like 2TB (these are fake).
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