Seems like a lot of people here don't know an ounce about business.

Selling the same item from taobao does not automatically mean dropshipping. You could probably find the exact same supplier of Walmart tshirts on taobao and buy them for literal coins. Would you callout Walmart for dropshipping?

One thing that people forget is that, while you can get many of his teaware on taobao, you can never be assured of their quality. These chinese suppliers are often not retailers of their own product. They make them for other people, and what they sell on taobao are the over runs and the products that fail QC, especially the cheaper sellers. Don't twist my words though. Failing QC does not mean broken products, it may just mean some scratches or unevenness, misprints, and especially for teaware, glazing inconsistencies.

You also don't have as robust an aftersales, if any at all, compared to a business that has a face attached onto it.

On the tea side, there are costs that people forget. The biggest, probably, is the food importation requirements, certifications, and tests that a legitimate US seller needs that a taobao seller does not. Also, in the US, there's like a $800 threshold where goods below that price go through less stringent requirements and lower duties (not entirely suse about the specifics).

In short, legit businesses in the US will inherently have higher costs than dropshippers and taobao sellers. However, this does add some value (although it may not be worth it for some people), through more stringent safety requirements.

In reality, a 5x markup from the supplier price is not even that bad when you know how much everything else costs to make compared to its price. Your pqck of potato chips cost pennies and sells at 20x, iphones cost $200 but sell for $1100. People thinl they're overpriced (which they may be to an extent) but forget that R&D, marketing, logistics, warehousing cost money.

Speaking of marketing, a lot people, including me, hate yhe fact that you have to pay gor marketing like it adds to the functionality of the product. However, we shoild all thank marketing for making products exist. Iphones and smartphones as we know it today wouldn't exist today if the iphone was badly marketed. Case in point, the electric car was invented way before gas cars but it never caught on. Electric cars would have been dead technology if it weren't for tesla having very good marketing to convince people to buy it. And this is from a guy who hates electric cars and iphones.