While there are plenty of sites to sell your goods online through your own virtual storefront, the biggest players are Amazon and eBay, with eBay pretty much being the industry standard. You can find just about anything that you might imagine for sale on eBay that typically one would normally buy within a store. Some of the advantages of an eBay are the fact that if the seller is out of your State, there is no sales tax, and in general, they have pricing that crushes the price of the same product that you would normally purchase in a store. How?
While on the legitimate side of eBay there are reasons why a seller might be able to get a product at an extra cheap cost such as through liquidation, or through an auction, or through access to a real wholesaler, and so forth, it just seems unlikely that these types of options are the most prevalent options available. That is to say, when you see so many products that are for sale on eBay, that are significantly below retail pricing, and are in theory priced in such a manner so as to produce a profit for a seller of such, it does make one wonder, especially if there appears to be a good supply of such, is this really too good to be true?
The first thing that comes to mind in this business model at eBay, is that eBay is the perfect outlet to sell counterfeit goods, mainly because there are so many people, that for whatever reason, absolutely believe that if you want to buy a Michael Kors handbag, for instance, that eBay is a legitimate place to go to find a legitimate Michael Kors handbag even though everything about the pricing of such, screams out that it has to be a fake or counterfeit, yet people will get sucked into making these purchases time and time again.
The other main thing about eBay and some of the goods being sold, is that eBay is the perfect place to "fence" goods as it used to be if you stole a rack of clothes off of a truck, or took a box of goods out of the back of a store during a delivery, that well, you wouldn't get a lot of money for those goods because they are all different sizes and styles and the street worth of such is relatively minimal. Now, if you get your hands on those items, you don't have to fence them to anybody, although you still might, because you can now set up your own storefront and sell absolutely legitimate product, for very reasonable prices, relatively quickly, without it having cost you a dime out of pocket.
Does this mean for a certainty that counterfeit and stolen goods are being sold on eBay and other sites like eBay every day? Absolutely, and the fact of the matter is, the doing so, benefits always the seller and eBay (since eBay receives a commission and other fees), and most of the time the buyer as well if they are either getting legitimate product or receiving goods that despite being inauthentic provide needed psychological and status satisfaction for that buyer for whatever dubious reason.
The losers, of course, are the manufacturers and the physical stores, themselves, to which the empowering of virtual storefronts throughout America, has given an incredible impetus to those that want to make that easy money to do so, because often the risk to them comes down to the actual theft alone, whereas the distribution of the product itself, is treated typically in a laissez faire manner.