They buy these LEDs from eBay and sell them domestically for a nice mark up. However, the customer service is great, and having domestic selection is nice, as the wait from China can take a month plus.
The lighting module is rated in Chinese lumens, which are 100 to 1000x what an ISO/ANSI lumen is. Just like the Chinese amp-hour rating is typically 5-10x compared to the conventional "western" amp-hour.
Those chips are in the 60-70lm/watt range, so a generous 3 watts is 210 ansi lumens. That's not bad for a small package.
There are so many great LED chips out there, I don't understand why they're not making it into retail products.
This is my porch light "bulb", 18 watts, 2500 lumens using 3rd generation Lumileds Luxeon REBEL leds, which are a ceramic and silicone device designed for very high temperature operation.
I had to build this myself, because I couldn't find anyone selling something that even came close. The LEDs cost about $24 and the buck driver is another $10... if I could buy something like this for $50-60 I would.
I've retrofit a similar configuration into each of my ceiling lights (they took two 9 watt wedge bulbs previously)
