Temu affiliate program: Make over £10K in just 3 days
Money Talk is intended to inform and educate; it's not financial advice. Affiliate links, including from Amazon, are used to help fund it. If you make a purchase via a link marked with an *, Money Talk might receive a commission at no cost to you. Find out more here.
When I wrote about my experiences with shopping on Temu, I briefly mentioned the Temu affiliate program.
It’s one of the reasons why the shopping app has become so ubiquitous – it has a huge uptake through word of mouth.
But it might surprise you to learn that you can actually make quite a lot of money from the Temu referral scheme – over £10,000 a week in some cases – with income from both commissions and bonuses.
Here’s everything you need to know – including how much you might earn.
How does the Temu affiliate program work?
The Temu affiliate program is pretty straightforward to use.
All you need to do is share your affiliate link or code (more below on how to sign up).
You can do this through social media, by sharing with friends and family or submitting them to coupon websites.
Temu actually gives a suggested list of coupon websites on its affiliate page – I can only imagine they’re inundated with these submissions.
Once you’re done sharing, it’s just a waiting game.
When people start signing up to Temu through your affiliate link or code, you’ll start earning commissions and bonuses.
How to sign up for the Temu affiliate program
I stumbled on the Temu affiliate program while playing around with the app for my review – it was just a link on one of the settings pages.
Since then, Temu has redesigned its app a bit so you won’t actually find it as a button on the site or the app anymore.
Instead, you can find the affiliate program by doing one of two things:
- Following this link*, which full disclosure is my affiliate link but it will give you £3 to start your earnings journey and up to £190 free credit if you’re an influencer and link your Instagram/TikTok/YouTube accounts
- Searching for the word affiliate on the app or website (the same place where you search for products)
Any of those two will take you to the landing page for the Temu affiliate program, where you can find your own affiliate links.
Obviously the prerequisite for being part of the affiliate program is that you’re already a Temu user, so you’ll need to sign up for an account first.
Feel free to use my affiliate link* to get £100 worth of discount coupons, and up to 30% off, if you’re new to Temu (I’ll get a commission based on the rate below).
Temu also has an influencer program* for those with lots of followers, where they give you credit to spend on the app and to promote the products you receive.
How do you earn money on Temu?
The Temu affiliate program gives you four potential sources of income.
Referral fee
The most straightforward source of income is the referral fee.
You get £3 for every new or returning user you sign up.
The £3 is the rate for new UK users.
You can actually earn income for promoting Temu in 66 different countries, and there are different rates for each one.
From what I can see, the highest rate is paid for Bahrain (£12.58 per new user), followed by Oman (£12.31 per new user).
On the other end of the spectrum, the lowest rates are for Austria, the Netherlands and Germany (£1.69 per new user).
If the link tracks correctly, you should see the commission in your affiliate account within 15 minutes of the new user downloading the app.
This is extremely quick – on other networks you’ll wait a minimum of 30 days, which makes this a bit of a game changer.
And if you meet the minimum withdrawal threshold (more below), you’ll be able to withdraw this money straight away.
Note that if you’re new to the affiliate program they might hold the money to check there are no malicious sign ups.
That is, you haven’t gone and created a bunch of fake users to game the system.
Commission
For every user that you refer to Temu, you’re also paid a commission based on what they buy in the first 30 days.
In the UK, the commission rate is:
- 5% if their purchase is between £0 to £49.99
- 10% if their purchase is between £50 to £99.99
- 20% if their purchase is over £100
Again, you’ll earn different rates of commission in different countries. The highest rate you can earn is 30%.
Any commission you earn in other countries will be converted to pound sterling based on the monthly exchange rate that Temu sets, which refreshes on the 1st of each month.
Commission income is added to your account as pending within 5 minutes of the order. However, it only becomes available for withdrawal three days after the delivery of the order.
Bonuses
To reward the most active participants of its affiliate scheme, Temu also offers bonuses.
There are two ways you can earn a bonus.
In both cases, once you qualify for a bonus, that money is held for 14 days while Temu checks your account for any suspicious activities.
If you’re not breaking any rules then that money will become available to withdraw after 14 days.
The earnings race
One of the bonuses Temu gives is for the “£3,000 Ranking Race”, where you’re competing against other affiliates.
Your rank in this race is based on your earnings, which includes both your referral fee and your commission.
Everyone in the top 30 gets a £10 bonus, and a £20 bonus if they make it into the top 20. From the tenth position upwards, the bonuses steadily increase up to a maximum of £1,000.
The ranking refreshes every three days so there are plenty of opportunities.
In the past, I’ve won the referral bonus with a weekly earning of less than £10 so you certainly don’t have to hustle too much.
The referral race
There’s also a referral race.
For this one, you’re basically just trying to refer as many people to Temu as possible within an unspecified time limit.
There are multiple stages, and the bonus and the number of referrals required increases with each stage.
The minimum bonus you’ll earn is £10, and it goes up to £5,000.
Referring affiliates
Guess what, as an affiliate, you can get money for referring other people to the Temu affiliate program.
Depending on who you know, this might be the hardest or easiest way to earn.
You get £3 for every affiliate you invite (you can use my referral link* if you fancy paying it forward).
For the first 60 days after they sign up, you also get 20% commission based on what the affiliate you invited earns.
Temu pays for that commission, rather than the affiliate.
If you invite an influencer with a big following you can also get a bonus of up to £40 – that’s on top of the usual fee plus commission.
They need to be on TikTok, YouTube or Instagram and have at least 1,000 followers.
They also need to have an average of at least 500 views for their last 10 posts in the last three months.
Is the Temu affiliate program legit?
You know, people love to Google “is Temu legit”, and the simple answer is yes.
By extension, that also applies to its affiliate program.
For a more detailed answer, I’m going to refer you to my original Temu review, which goes into a bit more detail about the whole set up of the company.
Can you actually make money with Temu?
Look, I’m not into sending my friends and family referral links and I don’t have time to submit my code to coupon websites.
Nor do I want to use my social media to promote Temu – I’m not an influencer.
But thanks to the people who have signed up to Temu through the referral links I shared on Money Talk, I’ve made about £90 in three months.
It’s not a lot, but then I haven’t worked hard on promoting Temu.
In my review, I was upfront and honest about the downsides of the app and the stuff I’ve bought and I think that’s the whole point – you show the good and the bad.
I’ve also disclosed the fact that I would earn a commission if they signed up – and they did it anyway.
So I imagine you could do a lot more if you’re proactively promoting Temu – and some people do.
That said, such high sign up rates are only possible because Temu is so new.
At some point the market will be saturated, like for TopCashback* and Quidco*, and you won’t be able to get as many sign ups.
How much do Temu affiliates make?
OK, so I’m not making a ton of money from Temu but other people clearly are.
At the time of writing, the person at the top of the £3,000 Ranking Race made over £4,000 in just a couple of days from referrals. Plus they’ll get the £1,000 bonus.
That’s more than what a lot of people will make in a month.
In the time I’ve been using the Temu affiliate program, the highest I’ve seen is over £10,000. Just to reiterate, someone made over £10,000 in just three days.
And in Temu’s ranking of the top 100 affiliate earners, the person at the top spot made almost £570,000.
So yes, you can make quite a lot of money with Temu if you put the effort in.
A note on legalities
You might think that promoting Temu is a great and very lucrative side hustle, and it certainly is for that £10K in three days person, but there are some legal issues you need to bear in mind.
In the UK, it’s a legal requirement for you to disclose the fact that the link you’re sharing is an affiliate link.
At least that’s the case if you’re an influencer or have a website like Money Talk.
So sharing on social media? You need to add an affiliate disclaimer of some kind even if you only have five followers.
Obviously things are a little more blurry if you’re just sharing with family and friends.
There’s also the matter of tax.
If you make over £1,000 from any side hustle in the UK, you need to declare it as income via a tax self assessment with HMRC.
That means you’ll also pay taxes on that income.
How to withdraw money from Temu
Temu has a minimum withdrawal threshold of £20.
However, you don’t have to actually make £20 in referral fees and commissions – part of this can come from bonuses too.
The first time I cashed out, most of my income was from various bonuses that Temu applied to my affiliate account.
In terms of payment, Temu uses PayPal in the UK.
The UK affiliate program is in pounds sterling so you don’t lose any money to exchange rate commissions, and there’s no additional fee to pay.
And once you hit the withdrawal button, the money should be in your account within a couple of hours.
The verdict on the Temu affiliate program
Publishers big and small use affiliate programs alongside advertising to make money on websites.
Based on my personal experience, Temu’s referral scheme is the fastest and easiest way to make money. And that’s coming from someone who’s been very low-effort about it.
What makes it different is that anyone can do it because Temu doesn’t care whether you have 100,000 followers or zero, or whether you have a website.
You just have to share your link where other people can see it.
So in the spirit of spreading it everywhere, here’s my referral link* again (and that’s the last bit of hustling I’m going to do).
Pin this for later
