some type of adult girl

nietp:

handweavers:

handweavers:

it’s when people open shops on amazon or etsy or similar marketplaces selling like clothes or weird off brand gadgets and home decor shit and it’s actually stuff that they just bought on like aliexpress or wish and similar sites for dirt cheap because the people who manufactured them weren’t paid a living wage + had that company ship it to you directly

so for example if you ordered a mug for $15 from a drop shipper on etsy (they will never tell you they’re a drop shipper on their profile and they will usually have their location set to somewhere in the US or wherever they’re primarily marketing their business to so it looks like a local, handmade small business) they don’t actually have that product, they go to whatever website is actually selling it and order that item to be shipped to you. the actual cost of the item was like $1.50 or something ridiculous and they never had to pay for anything like shipping or distribution because you just did that for them and they just made the easiest $13.50 of their life. that product will then ship from some warehouse overseas where the workers are treated like ass and exploited, and eventually arrive to you weeks late and you’ll see the packaging and think “huh that’s weird why was this shipped from china” or you won’t even notice it and theres your overpriced mug that you thought was made by a local artist or craftsperson.

it’s a BIG way that people run “small businesses from home” in richer/western countries nowadays, if you meet someone and they’re like ‘yeah I run my own online shop from home’ and they make a lot of money/are clearly well off but they aren’t like an artist or craftsperson or anything, they’re probably a drop shipper. & it’s pricing artists out of the market on marketplaces like etsy bc even though they mark up the price of the shitty wish or aliexpress or whatever item, the item itself sold on those original sites are usually a stolen dupe of something an artist made or sold for much cheaper than the actual fair rate for a handmade item and that undercuts the work and prices of people who Do Actually Make Things By Hand so artists get priced out of their own markets + more importantly these people in rich countries are profiting off the exploitation of thousands of workers in the third world who are forced to make these shitty reproductions for pennies (if anything at all) and while they are not directly responsible for the working conditions of the labourers the drop shipper’s profit margins depend on the product being sold for nothing by the original seller, so theoretically if the product they’re selling were to go up in price to reflect the worker being paid a living wage the drop shipper would just start selling different products, so their entire business model is reliant on people in the third world being exploited for their own monetary gain. it’s a vile and disgusting practice

forgot to mention that there are programs and websites that can automate this entire process for drop shippers so if someone buys something from their shop it automatically sends an order on their behalf and fills in all the buyer’s info and the drop shipper doesn’t have to do a thing during this entire process its all automated and they take in thousands a day doing nothing but profiting off exploitation and then call themselves “small business owners” lol

People selling you things like jewellery, charms, etc. on Depop do that too btw