I don't have a breakdown for the ring, but from experience that's not much more than what it takes to keep the product flowing to people's doors in the US at modest volumes.

Anyone can buy these in any quantity. If you have a few hundred dollars and are interested in learning a little about business in China, it would be a fun exercise to import and sell something like these rings on Amazon.

I did this with phone cases like 6-7 years ago. I setup a website with Magento, took nice photos of all the cases (which I found out is kind of hard). And started running some Google and Facebook ads. I couldn't seem to make a profit that way (duh). In hindsight I should of pursued Amazon. I bought like 300 of them.. and 290 or so ended up in the trash.

It was really interesting to do though. Talking with the Sales people on Skype was kind of funny, I remember in one profile picture, the guy had a western outfit on (cowboy hat, bandana, the works). I think a lot of the Sales people did that kind of stuff to connect and seem more trustworthy with Americans.

I also picked up some single units of headphones and breathalyzers. All the headphones were garbage. Some of the breathalyzers actually seemed pretty nice, but they would be expensive to purchase in bulk, and it seemed legally risky.

The main cost/challenge I found was shipping. Air is quick and easy, but really expensive. Going by sea is cheap in comparison, but requires you operate at a bigger scale. There's a name for companies/people you can hire that will handle all the tricky parts of shipping by sea (I want to say Freight Agent but am not sure).

Heh, this mirrors my experience almost exactly, except with Nintendo Wii / DS accessories. The day Google banned R4 cards on Google Shopping was pretty much the day the entire business died. I still have a big box of stylii / cases / plastic Wii controller accessories that I haven't had the heart to throw away. It even moved house with me. :)

Completely unsustainable (the tiny margins I did make would have been completely wiped out if I was paying proper taxes) but did teach me a lot about business.

I think a better price comp would be eBay with "epacket" subsidized drop-shipping. Various straight-from-Asia doodads, in my experience, are vastly less expensive going that route.

amazon arguably isn't really fair comparison for < $1 items because amazon doesn't really sell anything for less than $6 anymore because (I assume) they don't want to lose money on prime shipping if that's the only item in the shipment. OTOH I don't know what a better comparison would be. ebay would probably just be a similar vendor shipping from china.

Shouldn't these things be priced at $6 then, and not $14?

Why would that be?

Amazon takes it's cut, then taxes (I'd guess that the HQB vendors don't really follow up on tax obligation), shipping... and of course the importer selling the rings on Amazon has to deal with stuff like customs, regulatory compliance (product safety), and of course wants a chunk of profit ;)