What Chinese e-commerce platforms charge a merchant

Four platforms, four levels of disclosure — and one question that sounds simpler than it is.

This week

The question is “what is the commission on this category”. The honest answer depends on how much each platform is willing to publish:

• Douyin publishes its full category card — 269 rows, from 0.30% to 10.00%.
• Tmall attaches its rates to a notice as a single image.
• JD answers a four-field query with a deposit and two percentages.
• Pinduoduo publishes nothing outside the merchant login.

So the question has four different answers — not because the rates differ fourfold, but because disclosure does. Only one of the four lets you read the whole card.

The number that matters most is not the headline rate: it is the channel supplement, which can double it. Cross-border has its own card, and it is dearer than the domestic one. If you are pricing a store or comparing quotes, check which of the two you were given.

What I could not confirm

Taobao’s 0.6% base fee, capped at ¥60 per sub-order, appears consistently in Chinese trade reporting of the 2024 rule, but I could not open the help article that carries it — so on the site it is marked single-source, second-hand, not fact.

Alipay’s and WeChat Pay’s merchant rates are the same story: repeated everywhere, never pinned to a dated official page, so they are not in the post at all.

That is the rule here: a number either has a source I can date, or it says out loud that it does not.

Read the full post

What Chinese e-commerce platforms charge a merchant — the category card, the channel supplement, and the four levels of disclosure.

Next issue: one HS code, six rate columns, and why origin — not the code — decides which one applies.