Millions of people shop on TEMU — I do myself, and you probably do too.
The prices are attractive, delivery is usually fast (generally by commercial airplane), and the packages arrive through national postal services.
At least in Portugal, most orders arrive in about one to two weeks, entering the country through CTT.
However, the situation has become more complicated since the European Union increased customs duties.
To get around these taxes, TEMU began shipping some larger items — such as coats, duvets, pillows, or memory foam mattresses — by land.
That’s where the problems start: land shipments, coming for example from Chechnya or Poland, often end up held for weeks at customs borders.
Furthermore, the customer cannot request a refund or file a complaint until the delivery deadline expires — a deadline that TEMU sometimes extends by another 30 or 40 days.
In my case, I ordered a small memory foam mattress for €50 on August 27, and two months later (on October 16), I still hadn’t received it.
More than 50 days had passed!
Tracking is rarely updated and, in practice, you don’t know where the item is. Only after the two-month deadline has expired is it possible to file a complaint.
Be careful: more and more items are being reported as “lost” in customs or misplaced.
A parallel market has even emerged for selling “unclaimed or lost” packages from stores like Shein, Aliexpress, and TEMU — some truly lost, others “not quite” — and many Chinese stores resell those packages.
Personally, I stopped buying large or high-value items from TEMU.
Whenever I see the note “shipped by land,” I prefer not to buy.