First came the toasters, then the tennis rackets. The dog toys and tweezers arrived later. Within three weeks, 12 heaving parcels had landed on my doorstep, all from three China-based shopping behemoths: Temu, Shein and AliExpress.

I was conducting a test of these Chinese retail giants – each of which is flooding the British market with promises of prices so low they seem impossible. Increasingly it seems these companies aren’t just selling products – they’re waging war on our high streets.

Earlier this year, a survey found that these sprawling online Chinese marketplaces are rapidly gaining a foothold in the UK. Temu – pronounced ‘Tee-moo’ – which arrived in the UK only in April last year, is already known to 71 per cent of the British population. It is estimated to have amassed around 15 million UK users – that’s almost five times the shopper numbers on John Lewis’s website or Argos.

Meanwhile, Shein (pronounced She-in) is known to 63 per cent of Britons. And up to 43 per cent of Brits who shop online reported having bought something from Temu, Shein or AliExpress.

Each was no doubt expecting to cash in in the run-up to Christmas – with Temu offering discounts of up to 90 per cent and AliExpress up to 80 per cent.

Having previously written about my experience with Shein – which ended in an electrical disaster with an air fryer (it tripped my mains) – I wanted to compare it with its main competitors, Temu and AliExpress.

I’m not the only one to have had trouble with these companies. Last week, one Temu shopper said she was left ‘disgusted’ after purchasing a necklace decorated with a ‘plastic’ tooth for 59p from the site.

Upon receiving her item, she noticed that the pendant had a pungent smell. It was, she concluded, a real tooth that had been coated in resin.

The most popular items to buy from each are adult clothes from Shein, household items from Temu and electronics from AliExpress. Above, Clara with her haul

And earlier this year, another customer revealed that she had bought a ‘croissant-shaped’ lamp from Temu – only to discover, when she found it crawling with ants, that it was a real croissant, again covered in resin.

First, a quick crib sheet on the three rivals. Shein, now valued at more than $60 billion (£48 billion), was founded in 2008 by whiz-kid entrepreneur Chris Xu. It initially focused on selling cheap wedding dresses to Western consumers at very low prices, and has since expanded into almost every product category imaginable.

Meanwhile, Temu is the new kid on the block. Launched in the U.S. in 2022 and now worth an eye-watering £120 billion, Temu is owned by Chinese billionaire and ex-Google employee Colin Huang. The company launched in Europe last year.

Finally, there’s AliExpress, part of English teacher-turned-tycoon Jack Ma’s Alibaba empire, one of the biggest names in global e-commerce. Valued at £127 billion, AliExpress recently hired David Beckham as its ‘global ambassador’.

The most popular items to buy from each are adult clothes from Shein, household items from Temu and electronics from AliExpress. But, in the race for customers, all three have expanded their empires to include these ranges and more.

AliExpress is part of English teacher-turned-tycoon Jack Ma’s Alibaba empire, one of the biggest names in global e-commerce

Shein (pronounced She-in) is known to 63 per cent of Britons. Up to 43 per cent of Britons who shop online reported having bought something from Temu, Shein or AliExpress.

Temu is the new kid on the block. Launched in the US in 2022, it is now worth an eye-watering £120 billion

To make my investigation a fair test, I created a shopping list of 15 items across these categories: a toaster, an electric milk frother, a lint roller, an oven timer, a potato peeler, a hand-held fan, highlighters, tweezers, a desk lamp, a dog toy, an aroma diffuser, a tennis racket, socks, trainers and a gym top.

Then I ordered these items from Temu, AliExpress and Shein at exactly the same time. A quick note on the ordering process: it was, frankly, hellish. Forget everything you know about ‘frictionless’ modern-day online shopping. The luxuries of a well-designed website, accurate product descriptions and half-decent customer service simply do not exist in the Wild West of Chinese e-commerce.

Shopping on Temu and AliExpress feels like navigating a digital labyrinth. You are bombarded with countless offers and announcements: Half price! Ninety per cent off! Ten thousand items sold already! Nearly gone!

There are ‘mystery offers’ and flashing countdown timers on every page, while pictures advertising products are clearly AI-generated or poorly Photoshopped.

‘Special offers and countdowns are not unusual, but Temu takes it to a whole new level – it just plasters them all over the app,’ said Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at GlobalData. ‘It keeps customers coming back.’

In fact, in May, the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) lodged a complaint against Temu, saying the ‘marketplace is rife with manipulative techniques that are designed to push consumers to spend more on the platform’ – an accusation Temu denies, insisting its ‘goal is to create an engaging and enjoyable shopping experience’.

Shein was a (comparatively) calm experience – but, still, the site is full of pop-ups and adverts. In fact, all of these websites rely on meticulous algorithms to keep shoppers engaged.

And by downloading their apps, you are allowing your phone to be constantly surveilled by their workers. This is information that could be passed on to the Chinese state, since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has passed laws requiring any tech companies based in the country to let CCP officials access user data.

‘People don’t shop any more. Algorithms shop for them. The algorithm is telling them whether they like something or not, whether they are conscious of it or not. Once you set foot onto these sites, they use a very sophisticated algorithm to keep you coming back to buy more,’ says Dr Paul Carter, CEO of consumer insights company GWS Magnify.

Indeed, since signing up to each website a few weeks ago, I have been bombarded with emails. I have received more than 400 from AliExpress, 90 from Temu and 40 from Shein.

For each item I searched for, there were hundreds of options to choose from – many of which looked exactly the same, but with different price tags.

On Temu, for instance, a search for a portable mini fan yields tens of thousands of results. I later discovered that Shein and Temu have implemented ‘infinite scroll’ technology on their apps and websites – like the endless stream of videos you see on apps like TikTok or Instagram – making the experience more addictive for customers.

So I could never have come to the end of my search results, no matter how long I spent browsing.

My final shopping baskets on each site cost between £65 and £68. How could I possibly be getting 15 products for that price?

The answer: Temu, AliExpress and Shein do not own warehouses in the UK – meaning all their products arrive here via air freight. That means they can cut out all the middlemen, including distributors and retailers. For example, Amazon spent £71 billion on worldwide shipping last year, and this doesn’t include the overheads on its warehouses and ‘fulfilment centres’ in the UK, of which it has more than 30. These also employ 75,000 workers.

So, while it is more expensive to ship every order from China, other costs are minimised. As Ines Durand at digital growth firm Similarweb says: ‘They don’t have to pay workers minimum wages.’

Shein, Temu and AliExpress also favour importing products directly to consumers in Britain because it exploits a tax loophole. These companies can legally avoid paying UK import duties applied to all packages from overseas worth more than £135. This is because the vast majority of orders placed with Shein, Temu and AliExpress are below this threshold, and any that exceed it are broken into smaller orders to avoid paying the tax.

But back to my great investigation. Three hours after placing the orders, I hit my first hurdle. Having received 15 separate confirmation emails from AliExpress (one for each product), I received 15 separate emails that rather passive-aggressively informed me: ‘We noticed that the payment for your order is still pending. We kindly suggest that you complete the payment process to ensure timely delivery of your item(s).’ But I had paid! I even checked my credit card to confirm.

Confused, I logged into my AliExpress account. Alas, some of the items in my order were marked as ‘Unpaid’, and AliExpress was asking me to pay for them again, which I did.

Big mistake – I later discovered that this duplicated the order of those items, and meant I paid twice for them. This, according to various online forums, seems to be a common bug that has affected other users, too.

Not that I could ask anyone for help. The only customer service provided on AliExpress’s website is a primitive chatbot – presumably powered by AI – which struggled to understand my complaint. The only option I had was to cancel the order – so I accepted my loss and moved on.

Three days after I placed my order, my first item arrived – a toaster from Shein.

I was concerned when I saw that it was from the same brand (Aigostar) as my faulty air fryer – but it worked fine. In fact, for £19.99, it looked pretty sturdy.

Earlier this year, authorities in Seoul, South Korea, inspected 144 products from Shein, AliExpress and Temu and found many contained toxic material

The next day, the Temu toaster arrived. It was £23.59 – slightly more expensive than Shein’s offering, and flimsier.

A couple of days later, the tennis rackets from Shein arrived. Here, I realised I had made another grave error. I had overlooked the fact that the rackets had been described as designed for ‘youth games’ – and were child-sized.

There followed a series of identical-looking parcels – with no branding whatsoever (making it incredibly difficult to discern which company they had come from) delivered by Cainiao Premium, a logistics firm I later discovered is owned by Alibaba (the parent company of AliExpress), which fulfils orders from China within 72 hours to anywhere else in the world.

One parcel contained the two toasters I had mistakenly ordered. Both were tinny and far worse quality than the others.

To make things more confusing, each parcel contained products individually wrapped in packaging with the labelling entirely in Chinese. The same was true of the Temu parcels that then started to arrive.

My final haul was a mixture of hits and misses. I was impressed with the rechargeable portable fans from all three companies (which all cost less than £4).

The highlighters were all decent quality, too. Nor could I complain about the dog toys, which were no worse than any you might pick up at a pet shop, and the desk lamps, while ugly, worked perfectly fine. Shein offered the best trainers out of the three – but none would be supportive enough to exercise in. The same went for the gym tops, all of which were extremely unsupportive, although Temu’s version was the best.

There was, interestingly, significant overlap between the companies. Many of the products I ordered from Temu and AliExpress – for example, the desk lamp and the lint roller – were exactly the same despite being priced slightly differently.

The child-sized tennis rackets I received from Temu and Shein were also identical.

The reason for this is that Temu, Shein and AliExpress are essentially marketplaces where different sellers or warehouses list their items for customers – and many list them on all three sites.

Of course, this comes with risks. Many experts have expressed concern that some of their products come from factories in China’s Xinjiang province. This area is home to the Uyghur ethnic group, an estimated one million of whom have been detained in prison and work camps, according to Amnesty International.

‘A genocide is taking place in the Xinjiang region,’ says Conservative MP Alicia Kearns. ‘Temu has no accountability in its supply chain and has a reliance on Uyghur forced labour.’

Earlier this year, authorities in Seoul, South Korea, also inspected 144 products from Shein, AliExpress and Temu and found that ‘multiple products from all companies’ contained toxic materials.

The products that allegedly failed the tests include shoes from Shein, which were said to contain high levels of phthalates, which have been linked to cancer and infertility.

Meanwhile, insoles in sandals sold by Temu were alleged to contain lead at a level 11 times higher than the permitted limit.

Would these dangers be reduced if the Government accepted the threat that Chinese retail giants pose to British commerce – and welcomed them in?

After all, Shein is currently deep in negotiations about a blockbuster £50 billion listing on the London Stock Exchange and is eyeing up warehouse space in England.

I wouldn’t be so sure.

Alongside worries about Chinese retailers’ approach to data privacy, last year it was reported that Belgian intelligence officials were monitoring Alibaba’s logistics arm, Cainiao (the company that delivered my parcels) for possible espionage on behalf of the Chinese government.

Cainiao denied spying – but there remains serious concerns about national security in relation to these companies.

So my depressing conclusion in the battle of the Chinese retailers is this: everyone is a loser.

The ordering process is invariably exhausting, the quality of products is erratic, and the ethical concerns are simply too terrifying to ignore.

So if you’re debating whether to place an order with Shein, Temu or AliExpress, don’t be surprised if your cut-price toaster costs more than you bargained for.