Some bargain gifts on Temu come at the cost of quality

Bargain hunters are driving this year’s holiday shopping season, but not every low-priced option offers the best value for your dollar.

While the price wars heat up among major U.S. retailers, consumers are also looking to overseas sellers for affordable gifts. More than 1 in 5 holiday purchases will be made on shopping platforms based in China or with ties to the country, Salesforce predicts. Those include Temu, Shein, AliExpress and TikTok, which offer super-low prices that U.S. rivals have raced to compete with.

For customers chasing cheaper alternatives to name-brand products, the cost savings can entail tradeoffs in quality. Some children’s goods sold on Temu and Shein, for instance, recently raised alarms among safety authorities; the companies have said they support efforts to improve consumer protections and are focused on complying with regulations. Both firms originated in China and have extensive operations in Southeast Asia, and they’ve each exploded in popularity among American customers over the past year amid major marketing campaigns.

While Shein mainly sells apparel and accessories, Temu offers a vast range of products and has become one of the largest Chinese-linked sellers in the U.S. But when NBC News tried out several Temu items alongside their name-brand counterparts, the results were uneven.

NBC News looked at six products — a health tracker, a smartwatch, a pair of running shoes, a juicer, a hairstyling tool and an espresso machine — that together totaled $180 on Temu, a small fraction of the more than $1,000 bill for their name-brand equivalents.

Take Desertcat Direct’s Waterproof Smart Watch, recently listed on Temu for just $14 — far cheaper than the roughly $400 Apple Watch Series 10: NBC News found the device to be glitchy, packed with digital ads and imprecise. When a producer took it for a spin at Universal Studios, her Apple Watch logged 18,000 steps, while the Desertcat counted only 13,000 — a nearly 30% shortfall. Desertcat Direct didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Other Temu products worked pretty well, at least for a while.

The $34 juicer, comparable to a $60 Hamilton Beach version, made a lot of noise — and a perfectly delicious glass of beet juice. The $29 Temu hair tool functioned similarly to the coveted $570 Dyson Airwrap, using airflow to wrap hair around a curling barrel. But the Temu gadget got much hotter — a stylist who used it said she worried about hair damage — and created curls that loosened faster than those formed by the Dyson. That said, at just 5% of the Dyson’s price, it may appeal to those seeking wavy hairstyles on a budget.

While an Oura ring — which can run from about $250 to roughly twice that — tracks wearers’ biometrics to deliver personalized health insights, a stripped-down $16 counterpart didn’t fare badly. Its metrics weren’t as extensive, but the basic sleep and exercise data it gathered matched up with the Oura ring’s — until about two weeks in, when NBC News found the sleep counter stopped working.

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Another producer who tried out the $63 Temu espresso maker, which was about half the price of an inexpensive countertop machine sold on Amazon, found it got alarmingly hot. That prompted her to unplug the device every time she left her home.

And when one NBC News correspondent laced up some bright green running shoes — dubbed “Men’s Breathable Running Footwear” on Temu — that closely resembled a $275 pair of Sauconys, he found a potentially harmful outcome: The soles were so firm that his knees started to hurt after a 5K run, he said. After NBC News flagged that to Temu, the company said it suspended the sneakers and would conduct a product review.

Overall, NBC News determined three of the six Temu products performed as expected. Temu said that its smartwatch’s step counter and sleep tracker were within the margin of error and that its espresso machine got hot because of a preheating function for mug warming, a feature NBC News didn’t find mentioned in the product’s original listing. The company also noted that it lets customers return purchases for refunds within 90 days if they encounter any quality issues.

“Shopping on Temu is a lot like a scratch-off lottery ticket,” said Mark Spoonauer, the editor-in-chief of the product review site Tom’s Guide. “There’s a lot of excitement when you first buy it, it’s very cheap, and sometimes you’re a winner and sometimes you’re not.”

He recommends buying home decor and fashion on low-cost online marketplaces over tech and other gadgets. “If it isn’t a name brand, be wary,” he said, and avoid buying “anything that has to do with your health or fitness.”

Spoonauer also said certain electronics can be problematic, especially those that need to stay plugged in. “You never know what could happen,” he said.