yes, i'm very in favor of the shift towards direct-to-consumer among chinese retailers, but that might be because i'm not actually all that sympathetic to small business
it’s a problem of allowing the collapse of your own civilization?
Small businesses that do the work of curating a niche item, doing QA work that's absent on the shipments from china, and then offering much stronger aftermarket support/replacement/repair? That is often worth a (substantial) premium over wondering if the item showing up in a month is going to work as intended.
Aka like Amazon but with much smaller margins.
The savings would come from the fact sea freight is so much cheaper than air freight.
There’s a reason the likes of Aldi and Lidl have limited product choice.