Where are you getting those wholesale prices from? Do you mean the price you can buy an unbranded generic version? Because that's not wholesale, you can't buy it and sell against a listing that's branded.

In general the products that sell well will have a very competitive wholesale market and you'll be lucky to squeeze out 20% margin. It's certainly possible to get large margins in closeouts if you buy items that aren't popular, but it's difficult to scale that. And that's arguably liquidation anyway.

I'm getting those wholesale prices from hengdadice.com, the same wholesaler those two merchants both use. Factory prices, we can only assume, are much lower.

I don't know what you mean by "unbranded generic version". For reselling purposes, you can order a little card with a design of your choice on it (1 design total, 1 card per set of dice) from hengdadice.com, and both merchants I mentioned do that. That increases the wholesale price by a few cents.

The dice themselves are unbranded in all cases.

HDDais is trademarked. https://trademarks.justia.com/877/27/hddais-87727674.html

You can't sell on that listing legally, unless the goods were authorized by the brand owner.

Wholesale would be buying directly from the brand owner, in this case which would be "Shenzhen Lichen Trade Co.,Ltd.".

I don't know if they'd even sell you but if they did they'd definitely charge more than that.

In the United States, you can resell any product you legally acquired from any source, you do not need the permission of the original producer/brand owner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

No, but it needs to have been previously owned by the brand owner.

You can't buy directly from the factory without the brand's permission. That's counterfeiting.

From your link: "this same doctrine enables reselling of trademarked products after the trademark holder put the products on the market."

In other words, it must have been owned by the trademark holder at one point, and sold by them into the market.

If you identify it with that trademark, ok, maybe that's new to me but seems plausible. You can sell it without mentioning the trademark though.

We're talking about selling on an Amazon listing which has the trademark on it, which isn't allowed. That's what I originally pointed out - that the wholesale price wasn't relevant because it's not for the trademarked product.

... and this is why it's impossible to trust the provenance of anything you buy on Amazon!

The factory is the owner of the brand.

Not as far as I can tell in this case. I listed the brand owner above, which seems to have no connection with the wholesaler mentioned.

The brand owner is a trading company, and buys from factories, but is not a factory itself.

The HDDais brand owner doesn't buy from factories. He buys from Hengda. Hengda buys from factories.

HDDais is living the exact dream mentioned upthread, in which his business consists solely of buying things wholesale and shipping them to Amazon.

No, they're doing private label. It's a very different business.

Nothing's stopping you from registering your own trademark and selling whatever you happen to have on hand under that mark. Ownership of a trademark is free.

What is the difference you're seeing?

I didn't say anything is stopping you from launching a private label business.

The primary difference is that you need to spend to promote the listing because nobody has heard of you.

Oh yeah you're right, doh. For some reason I assumed the Shenzen company also owns hengda.

Amazon prices in shipping.

Retail at prices around $10 is all about psychology.

$1.50 is even a pretty high estimate. I've bought very similar dice sets from china for less than $0.50, and they have to ship them to me with that!

Buying generic from China is not wholesale. Wholesale in this context means buying branded goods, either directly from the brand or from a distributor further along the chain.

You also can't scale up the cheap UPU subsidized China Post + USPS shipping. It's for small quantities only. Order ~10+ and they ship via much more expensive means. Try and order a bunch one at a time and customs will catch on and seize them.

Why would customs care? Nothing in the package is an illegal substance

The UPU shipped items haven't paid customs fees / duties (or typically have WAY understated the value)..it's an exception for samples/gifts/etc. If they know you're shipping quantities, they want their money.

This is why some items on AliExpress either won't let you order more than quantity 1, or switch to FedEx only shipping if you increase the quantity.