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Interesting that this "transformation" is pretty close to what Sun and other dot com infrastructure sellers were promising in 1998. They phrased it as "take you

Interesting that this "transformation" is pretty close to what Sun and other dot com infrastructure sellers were promising in 1998. They phrased it as "take your small town business and give it a world wide footprint" but it is the same. They missed the "we'll take 1/3 of your price too" part :-). That, in itself, is just curious. But the interesting lesson here is that the real thing has not been "web presence" or world wide visibility, it was Amazon has built a pretty impressive logistics setup for moving stuff from vendors to users. It rivals what Sears & Roebuck did in the 60's and 70's. THAT seems to be the missing piece which one might call "logistics as a service." It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US. Clearly there are a number of Amazon vendors who buy from factories advertising on AE and then drop ship to Amazon, and sell at a markup that covers Amazon's take and gives them a profit. So basically Amazon is taking a big piece of the "value chain" from factory to customer. If you can run a distributed logistics operation at 20% or even 15% of the market value of the goods your distributing, you can under cut Amazon. Given that Walmart already has relationships with freight forwarders from China and a bunch of brick and mortar stores that could double as warehouses, I wonder if they have considered this as a "side hustle." Considering that this hinges on the cost of operations for the logistics service the interest in logistic based robotics is quite understandable.

skybrian 4y ago
Walmart does have an online presence and a lot of third-party sellers. I don't know how well they do, but it seems like they're trying?
kneebonian 4y ago
To be honest maybe I am just old but it seems like every argument and quibble people have been having over Amazon is the exact same arguments I saw back in the early 2000's the only difference is the company was Wal-Mart instead of Amazon.
- zaphod12 4y ago
  There is one single really key difference. Walmart takes responsibility for the products they put in their store. That they are genuine and represented as they are. They squeezed sellers, encouraged moves to china and all of that, but they aren't a marketplace - they are a store. Amazon has abrogated all responsibility in that area and pretended they are the equivalent of the open field on which a flea market is set up.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    Yep. For the curious, go search Amazon for "1 TB USB" for a good laugh.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      Sadly walmart.com is the same kind of trash. I searched 1TB USB and the top non-sponsored result was this: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Jonephe-USB-Flash-Drive-1TB-Metal-Memory-Stick-3-0-Waterproof-USB-Stick-1000GB/1541636209 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Jonephe-USB-Flash-Drive-1TB-Metal... Which has some obviously fake reviews along with probably a real comment stating: "Only problem is the transfer speed sucks and it causes errors in half the files I transfer to it." Truly emblematic of how these scam USB drives work. And its the top organic result on walmart.com!
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      Ya, and if you report or comment on the scams, Amazon acts to protect the scams. They have to know what is going on and simply don’t care.
      - wardedVibe 4y ago
        they have done a bad enough job that fakespot has a viable business model vetting their products.
  - phil21 4y ago
    > Walmart takes responsibility for the products they put in their store. Amazon also did this for it's physical stores. Walmart does not do this for it's web presence - it has a third party marketplace you need to actively avoid. I have both Prime and Walmart+ due to credit card benefits, and honestly don't see a huge difference in either experiences. Amazon is more spammy but faster shipping, Walmart less selection and slower but more reliable shipping. Walmart is more curated, but you still need to ignore the third party crap.
- autoexec 4y ago
  There are a few complaints that are unique to Amazon, but really it just speaks to how little has been done to fix the problems Walmart brought to our attention decades ago. Not dealing with those issues back then just opened the door for Amazon to come in and screw people over in similar ways. I hope people realize that their problems they have now aren't just about Amazon either and that unless things change it'll be some other company 10-20 years in the future doing the same things to the next generation.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So how do you propose those “problems” be “fixed” and not cause harm to customers who are getting cheaper goods?
    - autoexec 4y ago
      I refuse to believe that customers getting "cheaper goods" is dependent on employees having to piss in bottles to keep their jobs, or employees suffering twice the number of severe injuries as other warehouse workers. Surely, selling counterfeit/fraudulent products and allowing scammers to have free run of their platform isn't a requirement for consumers getting inexpensive goods either. Amazon pockets billions every year. They can more than afford to treat their employees and their customers better without raising prices a single penny and still remain profitable. Less profitable perhaps, but profitable. Amazon should be held accountable for their failures and for the harms they are causing to both customers and employees so that the next company to rise up knows that abusing workers and turning a blind eye to fraud won't be tolerated and that the laws and protections enacted to rein in amazon's exploitative practices will effect them as well.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        I’m not referring to Amazon’s practices or counterfeit goods. I’m referring to passing laws that “prevent the harm done” by Walmart crushing mom and pop stores. Walmart has never to the best of my knowledge been accused of the rampant selling of counterfeit goods in their physical stores nor do the people who deliver to stores have to “pee in bottles”.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> But the interesting lesson here is that the real thing has not been "web presence" or world wide visibility, it was Amazon has built a pretty impressive logistics setup for moving stuff from vendors to users. It rivals what Sears & Roebuck did in the 60's and 70's. THAT seems to be the missing piece which one might call "logistics as a service." I can't really agree with this. Amazon started out by using existing delivery services. And the quality of delivery from Amazon at that time was much higher. Now that they prefer using their own delivery services, their delivery sucks. They've built a logistics setup that is much worse than what we already had.
RC_ITR 4y ago
>They missed the "we'll take 1/3 of your price too" part :-). Maybe revealing - the incentives provided by the 1/3 cut are maybe why Amazon succeeded and Sun did not.
hammock 4y ago
> "take your small town business and give it a world wide footprint" but it is the same. They missed the "we'll take 1/3 of your price too" part For someone that doesn’t sell consumer goods that cut can sound like a lot. But getting distributed in brick and mortar retail, the cut is far greater (at least 50%). And the alternative is direct online sales, which only recently has become viable in a scalable way for most consumer brands (thinking of the DTC revolution here)
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  I think this is a solid point. Different distribution methodologies change the numbers. If you sell to a distributor at 60% of list (giving them "40 points" in the lingo) and they then sell to a reseller at 80% of list, the brick and mortar store has the option of having a "10% to 15% off sale" and still making money. Hence the "rule" that your cost of goods needs to be 1/3 of the MSRP if you want to go through two tiers of distribution. At Freegate we shipped directly to retailers and gave them 30 points off MSRP, but that meant on a new order, they ordered from us, we shipped to them and they shipped to the customer so a fairly long lead time between order to arrival. When I was at Google the PM for "consumer devices" was looking at what it would cost to get things on the shelf at Fry's and Bestbuy and the price negotiation was more about where on the shelf it sat rather than store profit it seemed. Something to factor in to the economics as well. But the bottom line here is that there is a "market price" for something, and the "cost to get it to market" + "cost to make it" and if that market price is less than the sum of the other two, well you can't make it up on volume :-). I think Amazon's LAAS business made that calculation simpler and thus there was less uncertainty about whether or not one could make any money selling them.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    My understanding is that most stores (especially grocery stores) basically make no money on sales...purely break even +/- a percent or two... all the actual profit comes from selling premium shelf space.
    - a9h74j 4y ago
slim 4y ago
It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US because US is not a free market. Gatekeepers got to take their cut (if you don't get outright denied access to the market because nationalism). Amazon is as good as any other gatekeeper, so why change ?
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  I see it differently, do you have a description of what a "free market" would be that the US doesn't have? You mention Gatekeepers but I'm not sure I understand that reference. As I see it there isn't anything stopping me from selling things directly from my web site to anyone in the world right? Where is the gate keeper in that scenario?
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    We're talking about a scenario where AliExpress builds warehouses and logistics inside the US to better deliver chinese imports, in direct competition with Amazon. I see an obvious gatekeeper. As a game, can you find any example of a foreign company successfuly setting up infra in the US to chalenge an US behemoth ?
    - ChuckMcM 4y ago
      This may not be what you're thinking but I see many; Nokia on phones vs the Bell companies, Toshiba on laptops, pretty much everyone on the PC vs IBM, the entire Steel industry, the railroad industry before them, Japanese cars eating Detroit's lunch, Zenith and RCA's TV market, GE's appliance market. Where is the gatekeeper in the Amazon/Aliexpress scenario? I'm sorry but I don't see that one yet. EDIT: You did say "infra" and the best example I know of are the foreign car companies that set up factories here to build cars in the US to get around import issues.
      - makeitdouble 4y ago
        First part is focusing on individual consumer goods sold through US retailers. Your second part and edit on car manufacturers is spot on: they were set a quota of "US made" cars and had to build factories in the US as a condition to continue chalenging US local makers. I'd call that gatekeeping
jerf 4y ago
"Interesting that this "transformation" is pretty close to what Sun and other dot com infrastructure sellers were promising in 1998." Everything promised in the dot com boom has basically happened, right down to the much-maligned delivering pet food over the internet. It just didn't happen fast enough to save them in the late 1990s, and the space was just overinvested even so.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  Chewy hasn't solved the problem that Pets.com had, we've just had enough free cash flowing around for longer this time so it doesn't matter. When Chewy starts to make more than they spend then it will be interesting, but as it stands now it just looks like we're in a bigger bubble rather than solving problems that couldn't be solved back then.
  - RhodesianHunter 4y ago
    A lot of us order our pet food online from our local pet stores these days.
    - xwolfi 4y ago
      Not enough for profits to generate
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wombat_trouble 4y ago
> It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US My guess would be liability. A lot of what's sold on Aliexpress is... questionable. Fakes, products that are patently unsafe or don't meet US regulations, fraudulent specs, etc. What's happening right now is basically a bit of a laundering operation where small "front" businesses in the US, often registered to residential addresses, import small chunks of the inventory, collect markup, and resell it domestically on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, walmart.com marketplace, or whatnot. And if their USB chargers keep catching fire or a big brand gets uppity about trademark infringement, the retailer disappears, and a new one pops up. Amazon gets some flak in the media every now and then, but they are several steps removed from the phenomenon. If you had a Chinese megacorp with a large US footprint, they would likely soon find themselves in hot water with all kinds of regulatory agencies. Partly because there would be a single party with gobs of money to go after, and partly because of anti-China sentiments.
- saurik 4y ago
  > My guess would be liability. A lot of what's sold on Aliexpress is... questionable. Fakes, products that are patently unsafe or don't meet US regulations, fraudulent specs, etc. I wonder how much further Amazon can go in this direction before it runs into the same problem?
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Yes my neighbor is one of those resellers. He's had several shipments from Alibaba vendors intercepted by customs for non-compliance. If Aliexpress would do this, they themselves would be liable. Here in Spain that do have stores but they have a highly curated inventory.
- lazyeye 4y ago
  And the obvious side-effect which nobody really wants to talk about is the destruction of the manufacturing industry in the US and the off-shoring of jobs to China. This is why it's so galling to see people in Silicon Valley moaning about the recent round of IT retrenchments. The f*king nerve of them.
  - 4y ago
up2isomorphism 4y ago
If you think “taking 1/3 of your price” is big, you might never sold anything to an end customer. No these small business owners are way smarter than you on this, they won’t even consider Amazon if that’s not saving their cost.
eunos 4y ago
> It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US Temu by Pinduoduo are trying their luck. Let's see in a few years.
dieselgate 4y ago
Heck, didn’t Sears n Roebuck used to sell kit homes from a catalog back in the day? I couldn’t imagine buying a whole house kit from Amazon
- sp332 4y ago
  Yeah, you can buy similar prefab homes on Amazon. Actually most of the ones linked from blog posts are now "currently unavailable", and most of the ones that show up in search results now are sheds or cabins with no bathrooms. But here's one with a bathroom and is ready to buy for $8,800. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B6V1G81D/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B6V1G81D/
  - sp332 4y ago
    Late edit: the one above is too small to be a real house. Anyway it looks like they don't sell houses anymore, but there used to be some on there.
    - dieselgate 4y ago
      Yeah figured fair enough though, the pics had a bathroom so at least it's designed as guest house/ADU type thing.
AussieWog93 4y ago
>It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US I'd suspect they do. Here in Australia, it's really common to get AliExpress goods delivered in 2-3 business days, with an AusPost label on the box and a return address in Melbourne. Even for goods not physically located in the country, they're clearly doing something clever in terms of consolidating packages, booking out large chunks of air cargo space and dispatching from a local warehouse. Same deal with the Australian return address, but 7-10 days instead of 2-3. You can tell when they're coming via this route, as they'll have the shipping method "AliExpress Standard Shipping". CaiNiao is still your bog standard 4-6 weeks by boat. This is a pretty new thing, and only came about after China lost access to subsidised global shipping (as in, subsidies from other developed countries, not the Chinese Government) in 2021. AliExpress sellers also lost access to subsidised shipping from the Chinese government in the last few years. Prior to this, for certain locally manufactured goods, they could send them overseas at a rate of something like 1 yuan per half-kilo (essentially US$0.02 or so for a USB cable), hence why you'd get all these $1 items with free shipping.

skybrian 4y ago

Walmart does have an online presence and a lot of third-party sellers. I don't know how well they do, but it seems like they're trying?

kneebonian 4y ago

To be honest maybe I am just old but it seems like every argument and quibble people have been having over Amazon is the exact same arguments I saw back in the early 2000's the only difference is the company was Wal-Mart instead of Amazon.

zaphod12 4y ago
There is one single really key difference. Walmart takes responsibility for the products they put in their store. That they are genuine and represented as they are. They squeezed sellers, encouraged moves to china and all of that, but they aren't a marketplace - they are a store. Amazon has abrogated all responsibility in that area and pretended they are the equivalent of the open field on which a flea market is set up.
- user3939382 4y ago
  Yep. For the curious, go search Amazon for "1 TB USB" for a good laugh.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    Sadly walmart.com is the same kind of trash. I searched 1TB USB and the top non-sponsored result was this: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Jonephe-USB-Flash-Drive-1TB-Metal-Memory-Stick-3-0-Waterproof-USB-Stick-1000GB/1541636209 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Jonephe-USB-Flash-Drive-1TB-Metal... Which has some obviously fake reviews along with probably a real comment stating: "Only problem is the transfer speed sucks and it causes errors in half the files I transfer to it." Truly emblematic of how these scam USB drives work. And its the top organic result on walmart.com!
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    Ya, and if you report or comment on the scams, Amazon acts to protect the scams. They have to know what is going on and simply don’t care.
    - wardedVibe 4y ago
      they have done a bad enough job that fakespot has a viable business model vetting their products.
- phil21 4y ago
  > Walmart takes responsibility for the products they put in their store. Amazon also did this for it's physical stores. Walmart does not do this for it's web presence - it has a third party marketplace you need to actively avoid. I have both Prime and Walmart+ due to credit card benefits, and honestly don't see a huge difference in either experiences. Amazon is more spammy but faster shipping, Walmart less selection and slower but more reliable shipping. Walmart is more curated, but you still need to ignore the third party crap.
autoexec 4y ago
There are a few complaints that are unique to Amazon, but really it just speaks to how little has been done to fix the problems Walmart brought to our attention decades ago. Not dealing with those issues back then just opened the door for Amazon to come in and screw people over in similar ways. I hope people realize that their problems they have now aren't just about Amazon either and that unless things change it'll be some other company 10-20 years in the future doing the same things to the next generation.
- scarface74 4y ago
  So how do you propose those “problems” be “fixed” and not cause harm to customers who are getting cheaper goods?
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I refuse to believe that customers getting "cheaper goods" is dependent on employees having to piss in bottles to keep their jobs, or employees suffering twice the number of severe injuries as other warehouse workers. Surely, selling counterfeit/fraudulent products and allowing scammers to have free run of their platform isn't a requirement for consumers getting inexpensive goods either. Amazon pockets billions every year. They can more than afford to treat their employees and their customers better without raising prices a single penny and still remain profitable. Less profitable perhaps, but profitable. Amazon should be held accountable for their failures and for the harms they are causing to both customers and employees so that the next company to rise up knows that abusing workers and turning a blind eye to fraud won't be tolerated and that the laws and protections enacted to rein in amazon's exploitative practices will effect them as well.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I’m not referring to Amazon’s practices or counterfeit goods. I’m referring to passing laws that “prevent the harm done” by Walmart crushing mom and pop stores. Walmart has never to the best of my knowledge been accused of the rampant selling of counterfeit goods in their physical stores nor do the people who deliver to stores have to “pee in bottles”.

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> But the interesting lesson here is that the real thing has not been "web presence" or world wide visibility, it was Amazon has built a pretty impressive logistics setup for moving stuff from vendors to users. It rivals what Sears & Roebuck did in the 60's and 70's. THAT seems to be the missing piece which one might call "logistics as a service." I can't really agree with this. Amazon started out by using existing delivery services. And the quality of delivery from Amazon at that time was much higher. Now that they prefer using their own delivery services, their delivery sucks. They've built a logistics setup that is much worse than what we already had.

RC_ITR 4y ago

>They missed the "we'll take 1/3 of your price too" part :-). Maybe revealing - the incentives provided by the 1/3 cut are maybe why Amazon succeeded and Sun did not.

hammock 4y ago

> "take your small town business and give it a world wide footprint" but it is the same. They missed the "we'll take 1/3 of your price too" part For someone that doesn’t sell consumer goods that cut can sound like a lot. But getting distributed in brick and mortar retail, the cut is far greater (at least 50%). And the alternative is direct online sales, which only recently has become viable in a scalable way for most consumer brands (thinking of the DTC revolution here)

ChuckMcM 4y ago
I think this is a solid point. Different distribution methodologies change the numbers. If you sell to a distributor at 60% of list (giving them "40 points" in the lingo) and they then sell to a reseller at 80% of list, the brick and mortar store has the option of having a "10% to 15% off sale" and still making money. Hence the "rule" that your cost of goods needs to be 1/3 of the MSRP if you want to go through two tiers of distribution. At Freegate we shipped directly to retailers and gave them 30 points off MSRP, but that meant on a new order, they ordered from us, we shipped to them and they shipped to the customer so a fairly long lead time between order to arrival. When I was at Google the PM for "consumer devices" was looking at what it would cost to get things on the shelf at Fry's and Bestbuy and the price negotiation was more about where on the shelf it sat rather than store profit it seemed. Something to factor in to the economics as well. But the bottom line here is that there is a "market price" for something, and the "cost to get it to market" + "cost to make it" and if that market price is less than the sum of the other two, well you can't make it up on volume :-). I think Amazon's LAAS business made that calculation simpler and thus there was less uncertainty about whether or not one could make any money selling them.
- TylerE 4y ago
  My understanding is that most stores (especially grocery stores) basically make no money on sales...purely break even +/- a percent or two... all the actual profit comes from selling premium shelf space.
  - a9h74j 4y ago

slim 4y ago

It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US because US is not a free market. Gatekeepers got to take their cut (if you don't get outright denied access to the market because nationalism). Amazon is as good as any other gatekeeper, so why change ?

ChuckMcM 4y ago
I see it differently, do you have a description of what a "free market" would be that the US doesn't have? You mention Gatekeepers but I'm not sure I understand that reference. As I see it there isn't anything stopping me from selling things directly from my web site to anyone in the world right? Where is the gate keeper in that scenario?
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  We're talking about a scenario where AliExpress builds warehouses and logistics inside the US to better deliver chinese imports, in direct competition with Amazon. I see an obvious gatekeeper. As a game, can you find any example of a foreign company successfuly setting up infra in the US to chalenge an US behemoth ?
  - ChuckMcM 4y ago
    This may not be what you're thinking but I see many; Nokia on phones vs the Bell companies, Toshiba on laptops, pretty much everyone on the PC vs IBM, the entire Steel industry, the railroad industry before them, Japanese cars eating Detroit's lunch, Zenith and RCA's TV market, GE's appliance market. Where is the gatekeeper in the Amazon/Aliexpress scenario? I'm sorry but I don't see that one yet. EDIT: You did say "infra" and the best example I know of are the foreign car companies that set up factories here to build cars in the US to get around import issues.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      First part is focusing on individual consumer goods sold through US retailers. Your second part and edit on car manufacturers is spot on: they were set a quota of "US made" cars and had to build factories in the US as a condition to continue chalenging US local makers. I'd call that gatekeeping

jerf 4y ago

"Interesting that this "transformation" is pretty close to what Sun and other dot com infrastructure sellers were promising in 1998." Everything promised in the dot com boom has basically happened, right down to the much-maligned delivering pet food over the internet. It just didn't happen fast enough to save them in the late 1990s, and the space was just overinvested even so.

time_to_smile 4y ago
Chewy hasn't solved the problem that Pets.com had, we've just had enough free cash flowing around for longer this time so it doesn't matter. When Chewy starts to make more than they spend then it will be interesting, but as it stands now it just looks like we're in a bigger bubble rather than solving problems that couldn't be solved back then.
- RhodesianHunter 4y ago
  A lot of us order our pet food online from our local pet stores these days.
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    Not enough for profits to generate

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wombat_trouble 4y ago

> It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US My guess would be liability. A lot of what's sold on Aliexpress is... questionable. Fakes, products that are patently unsafe or don't meet US regulations, fraudulent specs, etc. What's happening right now is basically a bit of a laundering operation where small "front" businesses in the US, often registered to residential addresses, import small chunks of the inventory, collect markup, and resell it domestically on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, walmart.com marketplace, or whatnot. And if their USB chargers keep catching fire or a big brand gets uppity about trademark infringement, the retailer disappears, and a new one pops up. Amazon gets some flak in the media every now and then, but they are several steps removed from the phenomenon. If you had a Chinese megacorp with a large US footprint, they would likely soon find themselves in hot water with all kinds of regulatory agencies. Partly because there would be a single party with gobs of money to go after, and partly because of anti-China sentiments.

saurik 4y ago
> My guess would be liability. A lot of what's sold on Aliexpress is... questionable. Fakes, products that are patently unsafe or don't meet US regulations, fraudulent specs, etc. I wonder how much further Amazon can go in this direction before it runs into the same problem?
wkat4242 4y ago
Yes my neighbor is one of those resellers. He's had several shipments from Alibaba vendors intercepted by customs for non-compliance. If Aliexpress would do this, they themselves would be liable. Here in Spain that do have stores but they have a highly curated inventory.
lazyeye 4y ago
And the obvious side-effect which nobody really wants to talk about is the destruction of the manufacturing industry in the US and the off-shoring of jobs to China. This is why it's so galling to see people in Silicon Valley moaning about the recent round of IT retrenchments. The f*king nerve of them.
- 4y ago

up2isomorphism 4y ago

If you think “taking 1/3 of your price” is big, you might never sold anything to an end customer. No these small business owners are way smarter than you on this, they won’t even consider Amazon if that’s not saving their cost.

eunos 4y ago

> It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US Temu by Pinduoduo are trying their luck. Let's see in a few years.

dieselgate 4y ago

Heck, didn’t Sears n Roebuck used to sell kit homes from a catalog back in the day? I couldn’t imagine buying a whole house kit from Amazon

sp332 4y ago
Yeah, you can buy similar prefab homes on Amazon. Actually most of the ones linked from blog posts are now "currently unavailable", and most of the ones that show up in search results now are sheds or cabins with no bathrooms. But here's one with a bathroom and is ready to buy for $8,800. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B6V1G81D/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B6V1G81D/
- sp332 4y ago
  Late edit: the one above is too small to be a real house. Anyway it looks like they don't sell houses anymore, but there used to be some on there.
  - dieselgate 4y ago
    Yeah figured fair enough though, the pics had a bathroom so at least it's designed as guest house/ADU type thing.

AussieWog93 4y ago

>It makes me wonder why Aliexpress doesn't have more warehouses in the US I'd suspect they do. Here in Australia, it's really common to get AliExpress goods delivered in 2-3 business days, with an AusPost label on the box and a return address in Melbourne. Even for goods not physically located in the country, they're clearly doing something clever in terms of consolidating packages, booking out large chunks of air cargo space and dispatching from a local warehouse. Same deal with the Australian return address, but 7-10 days instead of 2-3. You can tell when they're coming via this route, as they'll have the shipping method "AliExpress Standard Shipping". CaiNiao is still your bog standard 4-6 weeks by boat. This is a pretty new thing, and only came about after China lost access to subsidised global shipping (as in, subsidies from other developed countries, not the Chinese Government) in 2021. AliExpress sellers also lost access to subsidised shipping from the Chinese government in the last few years. Prior to this, for certain locally manufactured goods, they could send them overseas at a rate of something like 1 yuan per half-kilo (essentially US$0.02 or so for a USB cable), hence why you'd get all these $1 items with free shipping.