An unfortunately long time ago now, when I was a younger teen (like, 13), I had a large amount of mechanically inclined hands on hobbies. As a dirt poor person from the really dirt poor part of Appalachia, if you wanted something, especially in a niche hobby, you built it from near raw materials.
At the time, a few of the things I needed had a surprisingly small supply chain/availability in the U.S., and with asinine prices at that. One thing in particular, could be found practically nowhere aside from a single source in the U.S., and at something like $20/pop with a business type account necessary to purchase.
Frustrated, and having been raised by the internet, I went to China, mainly Alibaba/AliExpress for sourcing - Tangent: as I write out this comment, I was going to state "back before everybody and their uncle knew about AliExpress in the U.S., atleast." - turns out, it was only a year after AliExpress had launched. Didn't know that till now.
So, I found the specific thing I was after - needing only two of them. Two were $8 shipped, 10 was $17 - and these were the exact thing being sold for $20/PC from one U.S. supplier, and a pain to purchase. Obvious what choice I made, luckily had an older friend to use their credit card for purchase. Since I only needed the two, I for some reason thought, hey, maybe somebody else might be in my same situation, put them up on eBay for $5/PC + shipping, and hoped that maybe 2 or 3 would sell in a month and I'dve gotten what I needed for basically free.
By the end of the night, all eight of them had sold. Kinda shittered myself, and that's how I became a go-to stateside supplier of a few very niche fans, some other RC-type hobby supplies, and most notably the second top-seller of quality multi-stranded silicone "hobby" (UL 3135) wire on eBay as a sick 13-15 year old. A little over 2500 packages in 2.5 years. And, I think I've forgotten to include the main point - I was making some pretty massive margins on sales - but still undercutting the next seller by half or more. My entire point of doing this was in hopes of making some niche hobby stuff more accessible for people like me. I'm lucky enough to be able say that I'd regularly reach out to buyers and get fairly frequent replies, and found that I was often able to fulfill that goal.
Anyways, that's my I should definitely be asleep by now HN ramble of the week. My apologies that it wasn't on topic/directly related to "anonymous" dropshipping in which the "importer" never even touches their "product" cause err, my entire point being - I absolutely fucking HATE this shit ass fad or whatever you may want to call it I hear being talked about everywhere. Honestly, fuck these people. Fuck em like the intro to Method Man.