I don't know much about buying an individual pair of shoes from Alibaba, but I can guarantee you that U.S. Customs and the IRS have different ideas about how to get their cut from an lowly individual U.S. citizen buying a pair and a company buying large quantities of foreign goods to then turn around and sell on domestic soil.
That doesn't count what it costs to get the boxes manufactured, the import fees, the port authority stuff that I'm sure is a real nightmare, the warehousing costs, paying folks to load and unload, paying folks to process orders, paying the credit card company or Square's fees so you can accept credit cards, California state businesses taxes that I can only imagine are crazy, insurance and liability stuff...
AND after all that you gotta pay your kids (at least the one with an agent) because you're licensing their likenesses.
Oh yea... AND legal fees to get back the 1.5mil they had stolen.
https://www.barstoolsports.com/vira...olen-from-him-by-big-baller-brands-co-founder
I bet they didn't make much.