Why is it now a trend to point this out? Marketing foreign-made inventory in your country is a long-standing legitimate business. Most individuals do not want to personally deal with a Chinese outlet.
I think you have misunderstood what dropshipping means.
In dropshipping the business won't have any foreign made inventory and neither will they have any in their country. Instead they will hook you up with a Chinese outlet without telling you.
The Chinese outlet will handle shipping, returns, etc with the dropshipping business just taking a cut for essentially spending money on Facebook Ads. This is the part where you'll deal with a Chinese outlet regardless of your preferences, because the dropshipping company basically did this to you without your knowledge.
They don't have a local stock to replace items under warranty. They don't have a local warehouse to return your item to if you're unsatisfied. They might've never even seen the product themselves and thus cannot even provide support regarding it's use.
So that's why I think it's important to point out dropshipping. It's a completely different thing than keeping a foreign-made inventory. There isn't really any good reason to buy from a dropshipper, because you'll deal with the Chinese outlet behind it regardless.
> They don't have a local warehouse to return your item to if you're unsatisfied
Yeah well that's their problem and not yours. That's the value they are providing! The person who sold you something can't disclaim responsibility for selling it to you, at least under American law.
What value? What kind of logistics value could they possible provide if they don't have logistics in the first place?
It of course is problem of the consumer, as consumer is the one returning the item and the one who ultimately has to deal with a Chinese company that may not even speak English, not to mention the time the package takes to get there for a refund.
While it's the seller's responsibility in theory, yes, they make it very clear that you'll be dealing with a Chinese seller in their terms. Yes, it is your job to read the terms before you buy, however if you do read them, why wouldn't you just go buy from AliExpress after that? Absolutely no extra value buying from the dropshipper once identified.
Because it blew up as a get rich quick scheme / "hustle culture" trend recently as it became much more accessible via internet-based dropshipping facilitators, and there's a lot of people trying to make a buck on it, in sometimes nefarious ways.
Dropshipping is when you order from a merchant and all the merchant does is make an order with your name and address from someplace else. In other words, you could have simply made that second order yourself and saved yourself whatever margin the merchant added on top.
Do note that dropshipping is a very specific term, which does not mean "importing things from another country and then selling them locally", but rather "taking orders from customers and then just ordering a shipment from someone else directly to the customer". For example it would be dropshipping if I made an eBay listing for some product and, whenever someone bought the eBay listing, just ordered the product from Amazon to their address. I never touched or shipped the product; I just made another order posing as the customer.
It's not ethical for someone to clone a more expensive version of some Amazon listing onto another site, and then order stuff from Amazon to whoever buys the listing, pocketing the difference. It's just scummy. Sites like Alibaba really do help because otherwise importing stuff is a lot more manual of a process, but dropshipping on its own is just ugh.
> It's not ethical for someone to clone a more expensive version of some Amazon listing onto another site, and then order stuff from Amazon to whoever buys the listing, pocketing the difference
This is textbook marketing. You connect buyers and sellers and take a profit. You are bringing the product to the attention of a previously-unaware consumer. I can't imagine what you think is not ethical about this.
It's okay when the product they're selling is their own product. Say, Amazon fulfillment. The manufacturer sends their products to an Amazon warehouse and then Amazon handles shipping them out. But if a seller claims to have their own product but then just goes to another listing and buys it to the customer, that is what I think is unethical.
IMHO reselling is OK only if it's disclosed what the original brand of the product is... but even reselling doesn't necessarily imply dropshipping.
