Our philosophy
Someone always marks it up. We just want fewer of them.
Every product that reaches a US shelf has already paid an importer, a distributor, sometimes a brand, and a retailer along the way. By the time it’s priced for you, most of what made it cheap to manufacture in the first place is gone — not stolen, just absorbed, one reasonable-looking markup at a time. We built this to buy as close to the start of that chain as we can get, show you the real landed cost before you pay for it, and skip the markups neither of us needs.
The markup chain
Where the gap actually goes.
Two real numbers — today’s exchange rate, and the World Bank’s own measure of what a dollar actually buys — and what usually happens to the difference between them before it reaches a US shopper.
Exchange rate
$1 = ¥6.66
$10 converts to ¥67 at a bank or card today.
Updated 49m ago · frankfurter.app (ECB reference rates)
Purchasing power
$1 ≈ 1.9×
$10 of US spending buys about as much in China as ¥35 spent locally there — not the ¥67 the exchange rate alone suggests.
World Bank, PPP conversion factor (PA.NUS.PPP), 2024, a national average — not a quote for any one product.
Most American shoppers never actually see this gap.
A product doesn’t travel from a Chinese factory to a US shelf in one step — an importer, a distributor, sometimes a brand, then a retailer, each add their own markup along the way, and together those layers routinely run to several times the factory price. That’s not a coincidence: it lines up with roughly this same purchasing-power gap (today, about 1.9×), just collected by everyone standing between the factory and the shelf instead of reaching the person actually paying. Buying closer to the factory is what gives that difference back to the customer, instead of it being absorbed along the way.
It’s also why a simple change of mind doesn’t have to be a loss here. Shipping something back across the Pacific to return it rarely makes financial sense, so that’s not something we offer — a wrong or damaged item is a different matter and is handled directly, but “I don’t want this anymore” isn’t. The same gap that makes the price low to begin with usually leaves room to resell it locally instead, on Facebook Marketplace or eBay, for close to what you paid, or more.
Proof, not promises
Real orders, not an average we made up.
We don’t publish a savings percentage until there are enough real, paid orders with a real US price to compare against — an estimate dressed up as a statistic is exactly the kind of number this page is arguing against. The savings board only ever shows what an actual order actually cost, landed, next to what the buyer said they’d have paid at home.
See what people have actually savedThe same logic, applied to shipping
Freight has its own version of this chain.
Bulk freight is cheaper by the kilo than shipping one box at a time — the same reason a wholesaler pays less than you do. Pooling orders with people you actually know is our attempt at giving that same advantage to a handful of individual buyers instead of only the businesses big enough to ship by the pallet.
See how Ship Together worksNone of this makes the thing you want free. It just tries to charge you for the thing itself, and the real cost of getting it to your door — not for every hand it would otherwise have passed through first.
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