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by tylersmith 1805 days ago
> if you are foolish enough to pay markup on items that you could order yourself directly from AliExpress that's your own problem

It's not necessarily foolish, they're providing market-knowledge arbitrage which has value. If the reseller made me aware of the product in the first place and I'm willing to their price then the premium was the price I paid to not have to discover the product on my own, and to not have to bother with price comparison shopping.

I know $15 is an agreeable price and I can buy it right here right now instead of spending 30 minutes comparing vendors to find that I could save $5 on AliExpress, or just never having it at all because I didn't know about the product.
2 comments
cosmotic 1805 days ago
> market-knowledge arbitrage which has value

I'd pay to not hear that phrase ever again. That's not value, that's nonsense.

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Clewza313 1805 days ago
In plain English, that's "introducing you to a product you wouldn't have known about otherwise", and yes, if they convince someone to buy a $99 T-shirt, this service had value for the buyer.

The negative externalities come from the fact that very few people will buy random unbranded $99 T-shirts on a whim, meaning they need to spam a million people to find the one or two buyers in the haystack.

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herbst 1804 days ago
It's not wrong tho. There are categories on AliExpress where there are like 20 similar products but only one does what you actually expect it to do.

Ex. Clothing sizing is a big issue there. Or real CE signs. If I have to compare 20 products myself and only add the good one to my store I definitely added some value for customers

Also as said somewhere else local customer protection laws apply to dropship stores, but not AliExpress

Clearify:/ I don't dropship. But I know the game

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hwayne 1805 days ago
Dropshipping itself looks totally legitimate, and there's market value of selling things for a small markup. The scammers in this case are doing a 500% markup.
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tylersmith 1805 days ago
That discrepancy should be addressed by the original company. If people are willing to pay 500% more they've been leaving money on the table and should increase prices until the dropshippers are again only capturing the value that they're adding.
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hwayne 1805 days ago
They're getting 500% markups by scamming influencers into joining fake affiliate programs.
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