Sites like Wish have created a whole new type of shopping for customers whose first priority is low prices. They include Darlene Echaverria, 58, who stumbled across Wish when shopping for her grandson in 2016. He had asked for some Adidas Yeezy shoes, which sell for about $300. Echaverria, a retired nurse, wasn’t going to spend that much on sneakers, so she googled the shoes to see if she could find a cheaper version. Her search brought her to Wish, where a sneaker that looked similar to the Yeezy sneaker was selling at just $16. “I thought it was too good to be true,” she told me. When they came after a few weeks, her grandson loved them, but she had ordered the wrong size, so Echaverria now wears them.

Since then, she’s purchased dozens of things on Wish, including $4 bras, $6 jeans, and a $60 coat. She bought a $400 pool vacuum cleaner that was marked down to $75, and it still works, she says. She estimates that she bought things from the site a few times a week, until her husband nagged her to cut it out. Sometimes, the site will offer her things for free, like clothing for her Chihuahua rat terrier—she just has to pay for shipping. Since the goods aren’t coming from a retailer, they’re often packaged oddly: Shoes come wrapped in bubble tape with no shoebox, electronics come without any English instructions. But Echaverria says that as long as people know they’re getting a cheap item from China, they’ll like Wish. “You have to set your expectations realistic. If you don’t you’re going to be disappointed,” she says. “It’s not like you’re going to Dillard’s and spending $100 on jeans. You’re getting $5 jeans.”

Wish presents a significant challenge to the U.S. importers and manufacturers who have to compete with websites selling cheap stuff directly from China. “If you’re a manufacturer in the United States, you’re not happy about this, because you can’t make anything as cheaply as the companies in China can,” Kaziukėnas told me. It’s much cheaper to make goods in China because of the low cost of labor and lax labor requirements. That’s why shoppers once flocked to stores like Target or Walmart, where they could buy low-priced goods imported from China. Target and Walmart provided quality control, but for customers willing to take a risk, sites like Wish work well. Why buy a $40 bikini made in America when you can buy a $4 bikini directly from China? For that matter, why buy a $20 bikini made in China but imported by a U.S. company like the Gap when you can buy a $4 bikini directly from China?

Sites like Wish also create problems for localities trying to collect sales tax on items sold online. Most sellers from China are third-party sellers, which means that sites like Amazon and Wish do not have to collect sales tax on items sold in most states. (Many states are currently fighting this practice in court.) Even if more states begin requiring third-party sellers to begin collecting sales tax, it will be more difficult to enforce the law against companies based in China than those with a U.S. presence. “A lot of states say a lot of these Chinese companies are not paying taxes at all because they are foreign entities and they don’t care,” Kaziukėnas said.