Massdrop is branded around group buys of
premium goods, not batches of random crap off Alibaba. I think they would see high quantities of listings as spam/polluting their listings/damaging their brand.
Traditionally that sort of stuff just happens in a thread on a forum somewhere - but I have to imagine that there's a pretty significant incidence of non-paying users or organizers who get in over their heads, so perhaps there is a niche there for basically organizing private group buys as well, that are advertised through another medium apart from Massdrop's storefront.
Hot take here but since you brought them up: I think Massdrop has their own branding problems. I used to do them quite a bit but have stopped at this point because the discounts are just not good enough to justify waiting 6 weeks to get my item (and I've had some items that were delayed out to more than 3 months from drop completion to delivery). I now make it a policy to compare against Amazon or the retailer directly - and since you have to wait a month through Massdrop you might as well compare against Seeedstudio and the other source vendors directly.
Usually the discount is pretty insignificant ($5-10) so
I don't do it unless they are truly unique items that just can't be had elsewhere. And often those unique drops are limited to ridiculously low unit quantities and they're sold out before I can even order.
Not sure how quantity limits make sense on pre-orders, which is supposedly what Massdrop is doing. Is there only enough plastic left in China for 20 sets of crappy vacuum-formed keycaps or something?
It's a really nice model for Massdrop since they don't have to worry about fronting the money for inventory and waiting a month for the items to show up - their customers will gladly do that. But they're still very much taking the profit regardless of the fact that the customer is the one fronting the money - so it ends up being a terrible deal for the customer.