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.

  … 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

How many dead babies or battery fires post Temu, seems like good opportunity to conduct a before/after study on cost:ratio of EU regulations.

The EU is only good at imposing massive fines and they like to regulate technologies they have not created, don't host and have not created them.

TEMO will more than likely just pass the cost of this onto EU consumers.

Does Amazon or eBay get the same fine? Haha it’s the same people on all of these sites …. Just some dropshipping ?

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307237

Big corp penny slap on the fingers. I dont this amount will change behaviour or incentive to make larger profit.

I am very pro free market, but Temu with data harvesting and selling illegal projects should be banned together with tiktok...

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307237

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.

Isn't there some kind of law to disallow imports without a CE / RoHS / etc label? Why allow it to enter the EU, and then fine the seller afterwards?

Temu also should be fined for predatory marketing. Not sure if laws exist, but dark patterns are everywhere.

I try to a avoid Temu, but they have some good traits, too, like quick and convinient shipping.

Why there is a difference between selling and allowing to sell? If the product is sold in your site, you must be responsible of it.

This has been going on for a year now.

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...

This is something like an individual being fined $200?

Seems fine

I mean that was the whole point of Temu... buy shit dirt cheap because over-regulation harms the consumer.

Are you suggesting opening every package to check for a CE? I think fining after the fact is how those laws are enforced.

The fine is the application of the law. Would be like getting arrested and demanding to know why the authorities aren't getting involved.

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.

Who says the products don’t have fake CE labels stuck on? A CE label does not - as far as I can tell - have any security features.

They add fake labels, this has been happening for a long time

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.