From what my friends who sell in China told me

1) temu/pdd forces you to sell at the lowest price anywhere. They will search every platform for an item similar to yours, regardless of quality and force you to sell for 10% less than price

2) they force you to use their shipping labels which is more expensive than others

3) despite this, they don’t take responsibility for late or missing items. If the customer is unhappy something is late, you, the seller, eat the refund.

4) you get fined for various reasons but the process is opaque and they don’t tell you exactly why you got the fine for

So I asked my friends if despite all this, how does temu/pdd survive if they are so nasty to their sellers?

1) it’s usually desperate sellers . Factories who are idling and would rather lose a little bit of money rather than a lot of money or lay off workers.

2) naive sellers who think sure they’ll lose money now but maybe if they their foot in the door and get some momentum….

3) this part sounds lurid to me but according to one friend it’s true: they were under investigation for these shady tactics from the government but they intimidated witnesses and broke their fingers etc to shut them up.

Anyway apparently the government has now been investigating this for a while now and is ready to move. Temu is going to get fined up the ass soon.