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. Michael Zhan spends his spring travelling Yunnan’s gardens — Nannuo Shan, Xishuangbanna, Lincang — cupping fresh maocha and building relationships with the families who pick it. Sandry Law runs the Kunming procurement station where incoming lots are split into 25g, 100g, and 250g portions and blind-tasted against reference samples before listing. Liu Shenyang manages three cellars in three climates, choosing which one suits a given cake’s intended drinking window. Amgalan Chin curates across all of it, aging selections in his own cross-regional cellar and tracking 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.