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Comment by psychoslave | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t Temu basically Aliexpress with some "new shiny" frontend?

Not sure there is anything one couldn’t find on Amazon the exact same wares, though with the additional margin for a USA bigtech company in the middle.

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Not really, Aliexpress is from Alibaba, who has been in the exporting business for many years. While Temu is from Pinduoduo, a competitor to Alibaba known for malicious business practices including exploiting an Android 0-day vulnerability [0].

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/andro...

Edit: I should add that Pinduoduo also ended up being fined over $200 million after a couple fist fight with auditing officials in China [1]. Stay safe, EU folks.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/fistfight...

So, like Aliexpress is considered more ethical at this point? Asking as I heard Aliexpress’ ware could sometime be produced forced labors from prison in the underlying retailers. Not that prisoners situation seems particularly fine across all EU and USA either.

More ethical makes it more palatable. The reality is that alibaba is a lesser evil

Like the other commenter said, all you can say is less evil. Basically everything from China is made by factory workers working 12 hour shifts with 1 day off every 14 days, or programmers working 12 hour a day with 1 day off every 7 days. So forced labors from prison is not that bad comparing to daily life there, just another one of these first world problems.

AFAIK Temu is like the fleamarket for excess Chinese production.

They get stuff that the factories can't sell for any reason and just shove them out the country as cheaply as possible.

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