I always felt that way about those lists myself. And then I learned otherwise. If you haven't read this thread by now, give it a read.
http://www.thewholesaleforums.co.uk/...-list-but.html
16 pages long, it is. And by now over 400 members of this very forum have joined that site. Must be something to it.
The site you link to gives me the impression that it is a middleman site. I get the idea they don't actually hold much inventory, if any, but rely on others to dropship for them.
I am hardly an expert, but I just get that feel from the site. It would be interesting to see if someone came to the address whether they have everything they list in stock.
As far as paying to join, I have related here a number of tinmes paying $ 300 or so to join a US dropshipper and ended up selling over a quarter of a million dollars of their products. Plus, I get my initial $ 300 back when I purchased my first $ 2,500. I also got free goods, vacations and free shipping on a number of orders.
Now I could have decided to hold on to that $ 300 back in 2001. I would have missed about $ 150,000 in profits, a trip to Myrtle Beach SC for my family, another weekend away in the mountains and meeting a lot of nice folks who were also customers of the same country. (I still run a forum for about 600 of them.)
Life is a gamble, and business is even more so. It's easy to stick your head in the sand and think you are safe. All you are doing is possibly missing the one real opportunity that will get you out of the day job and on your own.
Business is not for the meek or timid.
.