Boston-headquartered Temu wants to keep things friendly with the neighbors up North.
The low-price e-commerce marketplace announced Thursday it has signed a safety-related agreement with the Canadian government.
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The voluntary agreement, called the Canadian Product Safety Pledge, was launched in 2023 and works to ensure consumers’ welfare when shopping on online marketplaces. In signing the pledge, Temu has agreed to take preventative and corrective actions whenever necessary to protect consumers’ health and safety. Health Canada oversees the country’s health policy and enforces the requirements outlined in the pledge.
By signing the Canadian pledge, PDD Holdings‘ Temu has agreed to four high-level promises: increase sellers’ awareness of product safety issues, identify and proactively prevent unsafe products from being sold on its platform, work in tandem with Health Canada and empower consumers with knowledge on issues surrounding product safety.
Health Canada has set forth 14 requirements underneath those four main categories, which are meant to help signatories better understand the scope of their promise.
Temu noted its approach will include mandatory pre-listing documentation on safety, automated and manual quality monitoring, quick-turnaround removal of non-compliant listings and “strict penalties” for sellers repeatedly violating safety rules.
Temu will also be required to put forth an annual report diving into the ways it works to combat unsafe products from being sold on its marketplace.
Canada’s pledge was modeled after existing, similar agreements brought to companies by the European Union, Japan, Australia and others, and is a first-of-its-kind pact for the North American country.
A Temu spokesperson said the pledge represents another step toward a more robust consumer experience.
“Temu’s mission is to provide consumers with safe and affordable choices for the products they need,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Signing this pledge reinforces our commitment to protecting consumers and ensuring safe, high-quality products are accessible to everyone.”
Earlier this year, Temu signed a similar voluntary safety commitment with the South Korean government, not long after the country launched an investigation into both it and AliExpress. That agreement, led by the Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC), has similar stipulations to the Canadian Product Safety Pledge.