There’s been a number of these Chinese brand-less product aggregators and distributors for a while now. Ali-express is another, and I’d used wish.com in the past myself.
Their basic business model is to be a point of reselling surplus products from outsourced product manufacturers. If I understand it correctly, if you have an idea for a product - or just want to make and sell something - there’s tons of these companies overseas, b it primarily China, where you can give them the specs and they’ll make them for you so long as you order enough. Then you can resell them as your own, mark up the price, and voila - instant business.
Now, these places often don’t have the highest scruples - or they simply never promise - not to make *more* of whatever has been ordered. Let’s say you decided to sell a … I dunno, a 12” double ended dildo with Trump’s head on one end and Biden’s on the other. You write up the design, choose your material, and get a quote for 10000 of these things for $4 each. You figure you can sell them for $20, so you place the order.
The factory sets up for your product, but makes 20k instead of 10k. Since it costs them $10k to retool to make your product, but only $1k in materials and labor per 10k, they’ve made their first $29k from YOU - but now they have their own 10k presi-dildos that only cost them $0.10/each. They toss them up on Ali-express.com, wish.com, temu.com, maybe other places. Do long as they can sell them for an average of $1/each or something, they’re bringing in the $$$ all thanks to your generous funding of their factory’s retooling!
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My point being…
There’s probably nothing wrong with a lot of the products here, but you never know. Don’t expect sincerity and honesty in their product descriptions or quality promises. Don’t expect any customer support whatsoeve if you don’t think you got what was promised or it’s broken or just ain’t quite right.
But you’ll probably be fine, just be very cautious, especially if you’re sensitive to certain materials.
As long as you’re not a difficult customer, the aggregator (wish, Ali, temu) will probably refund or give you credit for occasional bad purchases - just like “spoilage” (e.g. shoplifting, etc) in retail, it’s just the cost of doing business. If they get too many complaints for a particular seller’s goods then they won’t resell anything from them anymore - so there’s some incentive to not screw the customer too badly.
Think of it as back-alley business scaled up to extreme levels and you’ll probably be close to understanding it.
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That’s my understanding at least … buyer beware, but why not pick up a few things and see how it goes?
If anyone else does, I hope they post their experience here, I’d love to hear more a o it what people picked up and how it turned out!
-tyd