[screye]

Looking at wish, I just had an idea for another startup model.

"Massdrop for chinese products"

If you are going to build a wrapper company around aliexpress, might as well make curation your strong point. Basically a Chi-fi model as it exists in the audiophile scene, but extended to other domains.

Pair that with some 1st party support for 3rd part products and you have something really good on your hands.

I would think it would manifest kind of like Uniqlo. In that it is great value-for-money and has a (relatively) small but curated lineup of offerings that cater to a very wide audience.

[solarkraft]

I think one of the things that come closest to this are european-style brands on Aliexpress (Blitzwolf comes to mind) that pretty certainly don't do any R&D but are building reputatíons for only putting their badge on products of decent quality.

Something I haven't yet seen provided without a very significant price increase is customer support (which could already mean just a page listing all products with specs or a community forum).

[xyzzy123]

Honestly this is what many of the brands you are familiar with already are.

They don't design the stuff, they look at the clones in the showrooms or catalogs, check out what the reps bring to them, pick the ones they like and have a few customisations done.

Then they support that product.

Harbour Freight, D-Link, Wal-Mart oh I dunno, almost any brand which doesn't obviously have very unique/distinctive designs works this way.