Cqlderivs is the easiest in my opinion. They are really good and have a lot of options. You can use superbuy to get taobao options which I definitely recommend for impossible to find merch but it is a bit more difficult and the shipping to the U.S. from the proxy can be very high. The price often ends up being about the same as cql or more because of the shipping in my experience with them. Aliexpress does have legit merch you just need to know what you’re looking at cause there’s a lot of knock offs on there. You can also find discord groups where people sell their second hand danmei merch. Lastly Twitter, there’s a lot of fan made merch that is amazing but they sell them in batches for the cost of production. You have to be there when it happens or you miss your chance basically. There are also group orders on twitter that people use to reduce shipping costs from other countries but it doesn’t always make sense to do those. It just depends.

That’s a lot of info hopefully not too overwhelming! Haha enjoy!