Why a dedicated pu-erh marketplace
Pu-erh doesn’t behave like other tea. A cake bought today can still be changing in a decade — which means the questions a buyer needs answered (which mountain, which factory recipe, wet-stored or dry, how many years) are different from the questions a shop selling forty kinds of loose-leaf green and black tea is built to answer. Shop.puerh.app exists to answer only those questions, for only this one category.
Every listing names its vendor, its vintage, and — where it applies — its storage path. Pricing is shown per gram across sample, retail, and wholesale tiers, so a 25g taste and a 1kg lot are directly comparable. Across the current catalog that works out to roughly $0.25 a gram for a young shu brick and upward of $6 a gram for a twenty-plus-year vintage — the spread is the point: it shows what age and provenance are actually worth, rather than folding everything into one round number.
Checkout is in its final stages. Until it opens, every order — a sample, a full cake, or a wholesale quantity — is arranged directly by email with the vendor who listed it. The shipping and returns pages spell out exactly how that works today, including what happens if a lot doesn’t taste as its listing described.
From encyclopedia to marketplace
Teamotea’s constellation started with the pu-erh encyclopedia at puerh.app — factories, recipes, regions, and aging practice, documented in depth. Knowledge alone doesn’t get tea into a cup, though, so shop.puerh.app was built as the place to act on that knowledge: read the entry on Bulang or the 7542 recipe on puerh.app, then buy the actual lot here from the vendor who sourced or cellared it.
Sourcing that puts a name on every lot
The vendors on shop.puerh.app are not drop-shippers, and there are four of them, not four hundred. Spring is spent travelling Yunnan’s gardens — Nannuo Shan, Xishuangbanna, Lincang — cupping fresh maocha and building relationships with the families who pick it. The Kunming procurement station splits incoming lots into 25g, 100g, and 250g portions and blind-tastes them against reference samples before listing. Three cellars in three climates hold the stock, and which one a cake goes to depends on its intended drinking window. Selections are aged on across regions, with a record of how a mountain’s character shifts over a decade or two. Whether you’re ordering a 25-gram sample of aged Yiwu sheng or a full kilogram for a tea house, the listing tells you which of the four sourced it and why.
A constellation, not a silo
Shop.puerh.app doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s one node in the Teamotea constellation, a family of tea-focused sites built to serve different parts of the same interest. From any product page you can move to its deeper entry on puerh.app, a related brewing or aging course on tea.school, or the trade routes that carried pu-erh north on tea.travel. A marketplace works better woven into that context than standing alone — an informed buyer makes a better decision than one reading a product description in isolation.
Transparency as the actual business model
Price-per-gram is shown on every listing, across every tier, so the sample, the retail cake, and the wholesale lot are directly comparable — nothing folded into a single opaque number. Vendor profiles carry real working history rather than an anonymous storefront byline. And while checkout itself is still pre-launch, every step of ordering by email — what we ask for, how fast we reply, what happens if a tea doesn’t match its listing — is written down on the policy pages rather than left to find out the hard way. That is the standard the rest of the catalog is held to as it grows.