From Phil Edwards.

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Shenzhen serves as the global epicenter for the e-commerce supply chain, specifically anchored by the massive China New South City industrial park, a facility larger than any American shopping mall where virtually every major Amazon seller and distributor congregates to cross-pollinate. Located in the electronics hub often called the Silicon Valley of China, this area is visible on Baidu Maps via a Hong Kong VPN as the physical heart of an ongoing economic revolution. Inside this massive building and its surrounding distribution hubs, you will find live streaming setups and the headquarters of countless Chinese factories and middlemen who have bypassed intermediaries like Walmart and eBay to sell directly to the world.

These Shenzhen-based merchants utilize Amazon’s infrastructure, specifically Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and logistics initiatives like Project Dragonboat, to dramatically lower freight costs and streamline the process of shipping overseas for global dominance. By leveraging aggressive recruiting programs like Project Marco Polo, Chinese sellers have exploded in market share, surpassing 50% of new seller registrations by 2024 according to data from Marketplace Pulse. These sellers capitalize on significant cost advantages in logistics, photography, and business management while utilizing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and sponsored listings to push products under gibberish trademarked brand names like Cozyease and Gorglitter to the top of the algorithm.

The strategy in Shenzhen is deeply transactional rather than brand-focused, prioritizing high SKU counts and sales volume over emotional investment, often resulting in "crap" products flooding the marketplace to satisfy consumer demand for the lowest price. While some legitimate brands like Anker have emerged from this system, many sellers engage in black hat tactics, review manipulation, and rapid brand generation to exploit Amazon’s obsession with customer experience. This ecosystem has fundamentally shifted the power dynamic from US and EU sellers to a hyper-regionalized network in China, where factories in Jinjiang and Shandong produce goods that are aggressively marketed to Western consumers.