Yeah, I think it's hilarious too, but somehow it works for them, and they keep paying much of their server bills just through that model.
My impression is that the merch sold by the hentai image board is mostly things you wouldn't have cause to ever bring out in public, or even for guests in your house to see. They do solid bar bodywash, for example. (It's ironic!)
But even given that, I think the "merch" part of their "merch store" is just a token gesture. The store does just sell a pure digital donation item (technically sold as a "coupon code"), which doesn't involve collecting your address or shipping anything. And I assume that 99% of customers just "purchase" that.
The physical goods are therefore that merch store's Raines Sandwich — there to make sure the store legally qualifies as a "physical goods e-commerce platform" from the perspective of their payment processor, so that it doesn't come under money-laundering scrutiny. Presumably just enough real people buy the physical goods to avoid suspicion. I have a strong feeling they've only ever produced one small batch of each physical item.
Keep in mind that on a platform that isn't monetized — which means, among other things, that SPs don't have to pay to post — there's no reason to have any point at which you collect the SPs' real information! (The site might inherently collect visitors' IP addresses — including the SPs' — but anyone who cared could just use a VPN.)
Looked at purely in privacy terms, the site would be equivalent to old-school Craigslist Personals. Sign up with an email address; start making posts. (The reality would be more complex, for moderation / anti-spam reasons, but it wouldn't gather the sorts of PII you're thinking of.)
(And with that, I'm going to stop replying to messages about this idea in this thread. If you have any further critiques, DM them to me. My tangent here was never supposed to be about gathering critiques of this concept; that would be a derail of the topic. I was just trying to give my own justification for wanting to see further "what's wrong with LL" responses here.)
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