Yes, I think you may well be missing a few things unfortunately AB.
This site is a wholesale supplier site, but as with all wholesale, suppliers can't give you a wholesale price until they know what sized volume you will be ordering in, so the price they display is often the worst case scenario.
The idea being, you have to contact them and talk specifics for them to then offer you a supply price based on those specifics.
Second point, there are not just wholesale suppliers here, there are all sorts of suppliers, Drop Shippers, Liquidators and so on.
The third point which you seem to be over looking is that ebay is a Wholesale market place, not retail. Trying to source products from a wholesaler to then sell in a wholesale market place usually isn't the easiest way of making cash.
Kind of like buying from one wholesaler, then going three doors down and trying to resell the product to another wholesaler and expect to make money.
Wholesale purchasing can work on ebay, but if you are looking at the more sought after items, then you are talking about sellers who buy container loads at a time, even wholesalers themselves.
You either need to be buying in the same sort of volume to have any real hope of competing, or you buy in stock where the market isn't quite as cut throat.
You should also consider that there are plenty of selling avenues apart from ebay, I mean market stalls, independent websites and so on, so just because one supplier may not have prices to compete against those from suppliers on ebay, doesn't mean they aren't good to use for other selling platforms.
I'm not that interested in getting involved with US politics, so I'll leave the Obamanomics question to some one else lol