It seems Temu may be shipping goods directly from China to the U.S. once again.
The PDD Holdings-owned e-commerce company announced earlier this month that it would stop shipping directly from China to the U.S., instead leaning on a semi-managed model leveraging U.S. warehouses. It had been working with sellers to set up that infrastructure for more than a year by that point.
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“All sales in the U.S. are now handled by locally based sellers, with orders fulfilled from within the country,” a Temu spokesperson told Sourcing Journal at the time. “Temu has been actively recruiting U.S. sellers to join the platform. The move is designed to help local merchants reach more customers and grow their businesses.”
At that point, the company’s marketplace sellers faced sky-high tariff rates and the collapse of the de minimis provision on goods inbound from China. After a short stint of allowing users to pay import duties on direct-from-China items, the company decided on local delivery only.
Temu uses a small, green “Local” icon to denote that the product is coming from a warehouse near the consumer. Sellers with local warehouses also have a badge on their profile page denoting as much.
A week ago, U.S. consumers’ screens were flooded with local listings when they went on Temu. Though not all direct-from-China items are back online, Temu has started to resurface some of the listings, said e-commerce expert Joe Kaziukėnas.
For instance, a set of baseball hats, which says it would be delivered in five to 14 days, is linked to a seller that lists its location as China and does not have a “local warehouse” emblem on its seller page.
The reversal comes just days after President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. and China had reached a 90-day agreement to lower their respective tariffs by 115 percent. He later announced that he would drop a 120-percent duty on some parcels worth less than $800 inbound from China to 54 percent ad valorem or a $100 flat tax.
Kaziukėnas said he expects the number of direct-from-China listings to increase within the week.
For the moment, items that appear to be shipping from China do not incur an import charge at checkout. It remains unclear whether the consumer is expected to pay a duty upon the parcel’s entry into the U.S.; Temu’s site simply promises “no import charges for all local warehouse items.”