Will Temu charge storage and overdue fees, and also require the seller to bid every week?

Will Temu charge storage, overdue fees, and require weekly bidding from the seller?

According to statistics, Temu has opened sites in 12 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, and Spain. According to Sensor Tower data, as of March 2023, Temu has over 50 million registered users and 20 million active users.

The reputation of Temu has always been polarized: its “low-price strategy” has attracted countless consumers, but it is not friendly to sellers, and the profit margins of sellers have been repeatedly squeezed. In December of last year, Temu lowered the proportion of shipping costs borne by the platform, from free to each platform and seller sharing half.

Recently, some Temu sellers have indicated that the platform may introduce storage fees, overdue fees, and other policies. Before this, sellers only needed to ship to the designated domestic warehouse of Temu, and the storage fee was borne by the platform. However, according to the provisions of the “One-Stop Storage Comprehensive Service Agreement” provided by Temu by some sellers, if the seller’s products are stored in Temu’s warehouse for too long, Temu will charge a daily overdue fee of 500 yuan during the overdue period; if it exceeds 7 days, Temu has the right to handle the product by itself, and the right to the overdue product will belong to Temu, but the costs incurred during this period will be borne by the seller.

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There are more things that make sellers unhappy. There are reports that Temu’s warehouses are overloaded, and the warehouse capacity and sorting efficiency cannot keep up. The platform will release warehouse space every day at midnight. Since the beginning of the month, some sellers have had to stay up late to grab warehouse space to avoid their products going out of stock.

Some sellers have summarized the following experiences for reference after successfully grabbing warehouse space several times:

Clear the shipping platform before 12 o’clock;

Do not add the shipping platform at 0:00, you can add it two minutes later;

After joining the shipping platform, display the warehouse address before creating a shipping order (make sure the number of receiving warehouses is less than 5, and for products with a large number of stock, prepare the stock order number for each batch in advance and add them to the shipping platform in batches);

After clicking on create shipping order, fill in the number and weight of the package. If logistics is not available, repeatedly change the package weight and quantity information until there is available logistics to immediately make an appointment;

Note that you should not adjust the package information on the logistics reservation page. Please do it on the shipping order list. Staying too long on the logistics reservation page will cause changes in the warehouse information and you will need to repeat the above steps.

Image source: pexels

The platform constantly lowers prices, which is harsh. Previously, in order to maintain price advantages, if the seller’s price was too high, the platform would send a pop-up window. Buyers would talk to the seller separately to lower the price. If the seller did not confirm the price reduction, the buyer could directly reduce the price through the one-click price adjustment function on the interface. However, apparently, Temu believes that the seller’s price reduction is not large enough, and has proposed a weekly bidding strategy, which means that the seller with the lowest price can obtain platform traffic.

The specific bidding rules are as follows:

01

There will be a weekly bidding for the same product, and the one with the lowest price among the same products will win (Monday 9:00 a.m. – Thursday 11:59 p.m.);

02

After the system initiates the bidding, you need to confirm the invitation in time. Failure to confirm in time will result in bidding failure;

03

Products that fail to win the bidding will be restricted by the platform for stock and new product release, while successful bidding products will not be restricted.

Image source: pexels

Now it seems that the bonuses given to sellers by the platform in the early days are disappearing, and the profit margins of sellers are being squeezed repeatedly. Sellers who want to continue to cultivate Temu platform need to adjust their operation strategies according to their actual situation and improve their core competitiveness.

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