Like old video game stores like DK Oldies and all these people that advertise the latest iPhone 14 Pro or the 13 for like 1/4 of the price
In: 7
Depends. Retailers buy their stuff wholesale, as in they buy direct from the manufacturers, in bulk, so they’re getting their stuff extremely cheap, whereas they sell based on Market Value, which fluctuates based on supply and demand. Even if they sell at a slim margin, they can still make a large amount of money. Then you have drop shipping sites. Most of these are cheap sites you’ve never heard of, and drop shipping largely doesn’t work because regardless of the high margins, there is very rarely enough volume sold to justify the cost of marketing. There are some sneaky drop-shipping sites that manage to slip through the cracks and make a load of money selling cheap products for way more, posing as if they’re higher quality, or simply selling high volumes of cheap items upsold by a little more. Dropshipping is essentially buying from an online seller, usually wholesale sites or sites that i’ll get to in a second, and either shipping them direct to the other person, or to an intermediary that repackages them. Finally you have sites like Temu, Shein, Ali Express, etc. etc. that get their products from cheap manufacturers in China, primarily Yiwu. They often steal other people’s products and designs and have them cheaply manufactured a dime a dozen, and sell them for a couple bucks. Largely these products aren’t worth shit, but sometimes there’s something you need, it doesn’t have to be sturdy or last long, and you can get it dirt cheap from these sellers, but it’s really truly the least ethical thing imaginable, no matter what they say, like, these sites will tell you what they do is completely ethical, but only because they don’t legally have to give a shit what happens inside the factories, or where the materials come from. Of course, wholesale manufacturers, even some outside of China, usually aren’t a whole lot better. It’s amazing how easy it is to avoid human rights laws when you have a lot of money. Of course there are also times when sites are able to sell real products for dirt cheap. There are a couple ways of doing this. You can buy it direct from factories, or even retail in countries like India (iPhone’s there are like 1/3 the price), you can use it as a way to attract customers, such as when Temu recently sold several nintendo switches for very cheap, but it was essentially just a giveaway to attract customers, and there are sites that allow bidding, but can advertise items sold cheaply because you have to buy the ability to bid. For example, they can sell a $500 TV, and if there are 2,000 people bidding on it, and they all spend an average of 50 cents, and after the timer runs out, the final bid is like $17, the person who got the TV spent $17.50, they really got $1017 dollars for the TV (of course assuming they’re really selling the TV and not just awarding it to a bot account they created to always win, but that’s just a theory, I doubt they’d be able to do something like that without getting caught)
Anyways, hope this helps. I’m no expert on any of this, just what I’ve picked up over the years, I’m sure I got a lot of this wrong and left out a lot of information, so take everything with a grain of salt.
Tl;dr: wholesale en masse, dropshipping, giveaways, pay per bid biddings, chinese manufacturers in Yiwu
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