The sellers don’t always hold their own inventory, or even have space to. They might not even be in the same country where they’re selling.
They have crates of stuff shipped from the factory directly to Amazon, and from here they presumably can’t simply tell Amazon “throw it all in the dumpster” if it isnt selling well - or maybe Amazon charges them fees for that. It’s now expensive or impossible for them to return it to where it was made, it’s not selling, and they are paying Amazon to store it.
So on the short list of bad options for a dropship seller, you make the call that it is cheaper to ship these unwanted things somewhere than to pay for them to sit in storage.
The incentives here are pretty deeply flawed. These giant online marketplaces make it really easy for sellers to have almost no skin in the game.
Because the seller is in China and they're already paying to have the product shipped to the US so they can sell it on amazon.com
If the product doesn't sell they don't want to continue paying fees to store the inventory in Amazon's warehouses and they don't want to pay the fees to have it shipped back to China so they put a random address in and tell Amazon to return the unsold product to there.
And so the poor American can’t deal with the surplus of items that another person in China is literally selling to pay the bills to LivE. oh the humanity that poor woman receiving all that free merchandise that she could return get off her lazy ass and sell like the person in China for money. Oh wait, she’s privileged. She lives in America. She doesn’t need it. Why does she just complain about it online then
This is people buying stuff off of Amazon, and returning it in the mail. The vendor doesn't have an address in North America, and shipping it to a dumpster is harder than a random stranger. So they just have returns go to a random stranger.
