The items for sale vary from store to store, but most seem to be products that can be bought from Amazon or Alibaba, marked up several times from their original selling price.

The stores' setups are consistent with the dropshipping retail method — a type of a business where the store doesn't actually need to physically stock the items. Instead, a dropshipping store acts as a middle man between the customer and the manufacturer.



Combining dropshipping with an online ecommerce platform allows anyone with an internet connection to set up a store almost immediately, remotely and at little expense.

Interviews with people responding to messages for three of the Facebook Pages confirmed that they use dropshipping.

The stores appear to be run by different groups of people. Information from Facebook Pages' transparency pages list the users who manage the pages as located in countries such as the US, Canada, the Philippines, Ireland and China — and almost all are located outside Australia.

The stores are hosted on different servers. Most do not provide information about the websites' owners or contact details. At least one is registered to an individual who runs other ecommerce businesses.

The stores claim shoppers can help Australia's koalas by buying their products. A store has the text "Be the reason one lives!" overlaid on an image of a koala drinking from a handheld syringe.

Some pages are unclear about who they're helping or how much they're giving. One store writes "Each Purchase Made Is Funding Our Organization To Help Rescue & Nurture Thousands Of Injured, And Burnt Koala Lives" on its website, but nowhere does it explain how or who will carry out this promise.