The people at "the top" of dropshipping aren't AliExpress/Wish/etc; they're rather the job-shop owners making the junk that gets sold on these sites. The supply chain originating from these factories existed long before these online dollar stores came into being as middle-men in it; before the online-ification of dollar stores, these factories used to directly contract with buyer-importers working for the brick-and-mortar dollar-store chains!
These factories have never done too well for themselves. There's a reason they never achieve "escape velocity" into having brand recognition. Even before giant online dollar stores, their production (injection molding not-very-detailed plastic parts, etc) has always been a commodity; whoever's ordering runs of 10000 Alf stress-balls or what-have-you could swap Factory A out for Factory B at the drop of a hat. (And this is why you never hear of factories in China with genuinely good working conditions; the margins are too low for paying a living wage to be sustainable for the employer. And yes, this does imply that the businesses themselves shouldn't exist.)
Also, while AliExpress/Wish/etc do make a profit, they do so on the back of a market distortion — the Universal Postal Union's special rates+tarriffs exception for ePackets shipped from China. Remove that, and such companies would collapse overnight.
I don't think they're "the top" of a pyramid. They're just selling their trinkets to whoever pays. If you want to buy a bunch of units, so much the better.
Also, I think some of this is somewhat outdated: wages in China have risen, and the really low-quality and low-wage manufacturing has started to migrate to SE Asia.
Well, yeah, that's what I said: dropshipping isn't an MLM. There's no pyramid there. It's just a race-to-the-bottom, but one with lots of hangers-on at various steps realizing they can "sell shovels in a [self-proclaimed] gold rush" to various parts of this logistics chain if they can convince them they need the help.
Surely the people at "the top" are the shareholders in AliExpress/Wish/Uber? The MLM is just a few levels, with everyone invested in making profits for the company that controls the platform.
Multi-Level Marketing has a very specific definition — it's a tree of people reselling ("marketing") stuff, on the expectation that the person at the next level will be able to resell ("market") it in turn to an even-bigger sucker. Or an end-user, maybe, eventually.
Something being an MLM, implies that the original producer of the product — either literally the factory, or the business that ordered the product from the factory as a work-for-hire to then begin marketing it — is the root node in that tree of reselling, and so is the one getting the most rich, since everyone else in the tree has part of their profits flowing back to them.
If a middle-man between the producer and consumer is getting richer than the producer is, then you're not looking at an MLM. You might be looking at some other kind of immoral market manipulation, but it's not specifically an MLM per se.
