Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by bcjdjsndon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

bcjdjsndon

How do they enforce a fine on a Chinese company? What if temu says "up yours"?

View on HN

I visited Temu from Sweden and clicked on the terms of use, this is the first line:

1.1 These Terms are between you and Whaleco Technology Limited, an Irish company.

you won't be able to sell in the EU market anymore

Doesn’t Temu direct ship to the customer? What if they ship in plain unmarked packaging and keep changing the address of the sender? Is the EU customs peeps just going to start inspecting every single package from China looking for items from Temu? That sounds like a logistical nightmare. This sounds like old school thinking where you can stop whole containers full of stuff from a single supplier.

The money has to move from the EU to Temu/Pinduoduo coffers at some point.

Smuggling isn't a great business model for legitimate companies.

At some point it's a diplomatic incident and will affect EU-Chinese relationships. Even the Chinese government doesn't want to fuck it up for all Chinese companies just because one of them feels like the rules don't apply to them. It's not like the only goods flowing from China to the EU are cheap trash.

Temu has EU warehouses they appear to ship from: all return addresses I've seen are EU addresses.

What logistic company will ship plain unmarked packages? They simply wouldn't be delivered at all.

> Is the EU customs peeps just going to start inspecting every single package from China looking for items from Temu?

They might, why not. It would be unwise to pick a fight like this for any company.

Say they carry on.... How does EU actually stop people ordering from their website and getting items posted to their house?

Ordering ISPs to DNS block temu would probably be easier and effective enough.

Or maybe getting google and apple to make the app not available in the EU.

Maybe going for the money. Forbit EU banks from transferring funds to known Temu accounts.

There are still borders and customs inspections, that's how.

Just in a poxy country like the UK it's millions of parcels a day delivered across multiple ports mostly inside containers.... It's simply not feasible to check it all, it would cost a ton of money to have enough checkers and not slow down deliveries.

That's a failure of the state to control its borders.

> it would cost a ton of money

That's why the EU is imposing a €3 fixed customs duty per item (and later another €2 handling fee) effective July 1 (should have been much sooner in my opinion) for small packages (under €150), in addition to the VAT.

They'll put them on naughty list that will be enforced by financial institutions, i.e. it will be an infraction for credit card operators to process such a payment. Financial operators have well oiled compliance facilities and the payment won't clear. If Temu won't get the money, they won't ship the parcel. And if they won't ship, then there will be a bit less carcinogens in EU. Good stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com