Quick breakout from a longform investigative journalist's "expose" on Temu.
It's a manufacturer marketplace. Essentially, companies spec and place an order for, say, 500 units of an item to sell in their Amazon pop-up store. For the sake of example, we'll look at these "cloud slippers" on Amazon, that are all identical products from the same molds in the same factories, where some of them are even using the same
item pictures despite being "different brands", because someone gets enough money to find these on AliBaba and order the MOQ of 500.
The factory runs through maybe 550 because they had a MOQ on the thermoplastic that was a bit more than the 500 units. So they toss the last 50 units on Temu to dump them quickly. Essentially just leftovers from a drop-ship plan.
There's a similarity; AliExpress is essentially an Amazon as well. It's cheaper only because they're using pickup windows from the factory to plan for dumps. If 600 people order a thing, then an order is placed with the factory to make 600 units and ship them directly to the customers as they finish production or are available instead of shipping them to warehouses to be stored, picked, packed, and shipped.
Once again, Temu is just the dumping ground for overproduction. So it will have the same product, but typically not from a million "stores". It's coming straight from the factory on behalf of the factory.
That said, there's obviously a high likelihood that Temu houses many of products produced with slave labor. But if that same slipper is on Temu, and AliExpress, and Amazon, and AliBaba, all imported from China and seemingly coming from one factory... then every source you'll find the thing is produced with slave labor. The moralistic opposition really is in favor of "don't buy cheap crap online".
To that end.
The quality of what you find on Temu is going to roughly be identical to that on Amazon for the same product. It's not hard to find matches.
So while
this gear indicator made by "JMORCO" is on Amazon for $51,
this is very clearly the same product from the same factory with the same product photos for $31.
(Fun fact: The Temu listing is by a Chinese company called Heigoal, who sells nothing but aftermarket Motorcycle components, including gear indicators for many other models of bike, suggesting they're the original manufacturer or commissioner of the product. The Amazon lister, "JMORCO", sells everything from motorcycle parts to bed sheets and comforters to stepper motor pulleys to WiFi extenders to women's underwear. Needless to say they're
not the manufacturer.)
Long story short.
Give Temu a look if you find something on Amazon you like. It's going to be the same product made in the same factory by the same (possibly enslaved) labor for less money. Buying from them doesn't incentivize that; it just lowers the margin and makes less money for the companies that are possibly exploiting that labor. We do live in a world where there's not necessarily an "American" option made in the first place for our use case, so getting "made in China" isn't an option on many things unless just not having it is preferable.
