Well, it wouild be if someone on Terra outfitted a ship and sent it to Regina with a cargo. But it's extremely unlikely that anyone would do that. Rather they would send a cargo to Muan Gwi, sell it, buy Reginan nutberry brandy, and return to Terra. That cargo gets sold to someone who transports it to Libert/Diaspora. From there it goes through more links until at last it is sold on Mora to someone who takes it to Regina.
And, yes, all those middlemen do add frightfully to the cost. The number of links may be fewer and their lengths greater.
Hans
Except that GTFT says there won't be middlemen. They use a demand-trade based model. Stuff only goes when someone demands it.
There might be up to 5 middlemen - that would make it akin to the worst cases for the silk road. Bought in china, sold in india, sold again in iran, and again in lebanon, then in france or england, and then again at the final city, and then on to the end user... that's about the largest handover chain documented between manufacturer's warehouse and point of sale to end user I recall reading about. And that promptly got shortened when the trade started to stabilize... china to an overland merchant in Arabia, then to an english, french, spanish, or italian merchant on the other side of arabia, and then to a final country importer, and on to final sale.
Why? higher margin and lower end cost.
But in the case of those GTFT long distance trade numbers, everything will have some means of production closer. Livestock, you just X-mail the genome to the buyer's nearest TL12+ ag world, and grow a starter herd, ship those where you want them. Just like you don't ship the stud bull now, you ship his semen.
Given the markup, it's probably pretty easy to chemically manufacture your 1992 Chateau Rothchild by exact chemical replication after a chromatographic analysis... and you ship the formula, not the bottle... at least you do so far enough away that they can't easily get to you. 3-4 months travel time is plenty... You duplicate one bottle, and sell 3-4 thousand... TL12+ manufacturing at work.
Only information is worth shipping that far.