As Phillipma found, the bulk orders are shipped directly from China bypassing the 'local' small orders stock Canaan uses which is shipped from HK. "Direct from China' I take means shipped directly from the factory.
As for distributors, biggest problem with it is Bitmain. They have pretty much set the price of miners in general. As a result miners from Canaan, eBang, and Hotmine have to stay close to BM's pricing.
That said, folks have to realize that typical distributor/reseller markup is at least 50% and often 100% (and more when the market will bear it). Doesn't matter if you are Walmart, Home Depot or an eBay reseller that is what drives the supplier/OEM pricing to them (when they have a say in it of course). So... since then end game is for the distributor/resellers to have a market against Bitmains s9 pricing that means that Canaan needs to set their wholesale pricing much lower to have a shot at sizeable reseller/distributor-based market share against Bitmain.
Not going to happen...
Now the fact that people ARE willing to pay Ebay/Amazon resellers a healthy premium to get a miner in days certainly says a lot and certainly helps cushion Canaan's wholesale pricing dilemma but only a little. The main problem buyers face when purchasing from any reseller has always been only 2 things:
NO Factory warranty and NO Factory backup whatsoever
The trust/scammer factor
Having to use Fiat eg 'real money' vs BTC
Ok, that's 3...
What is this? The Spanish Inquisition?
If Canaan officially sets up a shop say using the shipped-direct-from-Amazon setup (Amazon or whoever holds the stock in their hub warehouses and ships from them) then problem solved; Is an Official factory store with painless checkout AND being Official the buyers have full Factory Warranty on the miners.
The Amazon back-end takes care of everything and Canaan largely only has to keep the warehouses full by tracking demand and setting production to match it.. Ja it costs a percentage of revenue from the store-based sales to run but so what? The Premium-priced market obviously IS there plus they way these are built and yes, even look, fits the general idea of how best-quality equipment
should look and perform.