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Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

Buy something from China in semi-bulk (e.g., 6–12x) on Alibaba / AliExpress and resell for profit from the US.

Even on very small purchases, like $3 phone cases, people are willing to pay 2-3x the price to be able to get them quickly from someone shipping from inside the US. While it's not _highly_ profitable after fees, I think you could automate and outsource most / all of the work.

Not sure if this totally aligns with what you and your friend are doing, but just an idea I've been wanting to try lately.

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The caveat to this might be the longer shipping times from China. I'm just bringing it up since this contest is also a race of sorts.

Yep, it totally is. So the person running it has to act more as a "cache" vs dropshiping. I look at it as time arbitrage because people are happy to pay more to wait less.

I think there's some interesting detail in optimizing against the market for how much higher cost and shorter delivery time people value, kind of like a convenience store.

Yeah I was thinking about something like that, might do it for the next project. I know a guy who buys 'high quality tea' from China and resells it with a fancy modern website.

Are there any kind of FDA restrictions on that?

Yes. It seems the major one is:

>All commercial imports of food products require the filing of Prior Notice with FDA, and foreign manufacturers and/or distributers of food products must register with the FDA before their goods may be admitted.

You can see the rest here: https://help.cbp.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/337/~/importing...

I wonder if tea is considered a food, and if reselling sealed boxes of tea is considering being a distributor.

If you are importing it:

>Imports of tea, coffee, and spices are subject to review by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and their admissibility is determined by the FDA.

So it would still have to go through the FDA. It may not be as stringent as something like meat but it still has to get approval.

Also, you don't need to be a distributor to fall under this, you just need to be importing it for commercial use. That means if you are buying a box to sell or just the leaves to sell, both would fall under these rules.

Does an end user purchasing a box of tea from a seller outside of the country count as importing? Or is it just about reselling?

It is only for commercial purposes, so a consumer buying and importing the tea for purpose of consumption is fine and doesn't need to work with the FDA.

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