I did a thorough browse of a few of the markets last night and this idea started forming in my head. What if there's only a small handful (or even one?) of dutch producers that are supplying everyone on the market?
My reason for saying this:
1) The listings are very homogeneous. 'Absolute purist dutch fire', 'Best from Holland', etc... And that's not just Europe, that's a lot of US vendors as well. The product (I'm looking at crystal but you could say the same for the pills of course) looks like the same few options - champagne, purple, etc..., that each look like the next.
2) I haven't counted but there's not many vendors. It's very easy to browse through a market's entire listings and there aren't that many active markets. And each vendor has multiple size listings that bulk up the number of listings.
3) The listing text doesn't inspire the feeling that the vendors know their products. Some copy and paste something about xtc they found on the internet, but they look like resellers who are just doing the minimum admin.
4) When a listing does stand out, like they say something like from sassafras, I'm thinking that's just some better googling (and I have tried and it's still meh). Also, the only profile like that at the moment was from a new vendor with no reviews and who also had another listing for dutch import so looked suspicious
5) Some explicitly say they are resellers
At one point on the DW I did come across a supplier that set up a site for resellers to contact them, and their name does appear in a couple of places. I'm wondering if its literally a case of one or a few mega producers setting up a service to resellers and that's basically everything you see on the DW. Therefore, it would only need these few producers to cut corners in the method for meh to be so widespread.
It blows my mind that this could possibly the case - I would have thought decent suppliers could carve out a niche and clean up, but the more I think about what I'm seeing there, the more it makes sense.