What Chinese e-commerce platforms charge a merchant

Four platforms, four levels of disclosure. Douyin publishes a category fee schedule anyone can read in full. Tmall attaches its new rates to a cut notice as one image. JD answers a four-field query with a deposit and two percentages. Pinduoduo publishes nothing outside the merchant login.

I opened all four on 18 October 2026 as an anonymous visitor and wrote down what each one showed.

The money chain behind these rates — who pays whom, and when the remainder lands — is in the livestream settlement post. This page is only the rate card.

Only one of the four publishes a full rate card

Douyin publishes a 269-row category fee schedule that anyone can read; the other three publish less.

A fee and a fee card are different objects. Douyin’s card anyone can check. JD’s rate needs four selections. Tmall’s sit inside a picture. Pinduoduo’s sit behind a login.

Douyin’s card runs from 0.30% to 10.00%

Base rates run from 0.30% on phone top-ups to 10.00% on a single catch-all row under 行业服务权益, and the median total across all rows is 6.90%.

The table below is my arithmetic over all 269 category rows of the 2026 base technical service fee schedule (page dated 14 July 2026). Base rate and channel supplement are separate columns there. Total is base plus supplement, which is how the platform’s own settlement formula defines the order-level fee.

Those rows sum to 269. The rendered table carries one more row with no category and a 0.00% rate, which I left out of every count.

Across the 269 rows, 99 total 10.00%, 73 total 4.60%, 55 total 6.90% and 11 total 9.20%. Child rows appear only where the rate differs, which is why the distribution is lumpy.

The channel supplement is where a rate doubles

A second column adds up to 5.20 percentage points when an order arrives through the Douyin Mall app or Doubao.

The fee rule names those two channels and no others. A rate comes from the category chosen at listing plus the channel the order came through: base fee, plus a supplement for those channels, with the order’s settlement statement deciding which side an order fell on (merchant technical service fee rule, 28 September 2026).

On 98 of the 269 rows the supplement equals the base exactly, so apparel in mall search totals 10.00% and the same apparel in a livestream costs 5.00%. On 151 rows the supplement is 1.3 times the base, which produces the 4.60%, 6.90% and 9.20% totals.

The settlement base is wider than the retail price: what the buyer paid including shipping, plus host coupons, platform coupons and subsidies, minus the merchant-funded parts. Headline rates compare only if both are computed this way.

Deposits follow turnover, not category

Douyin’s ordinary deposit is ¥500, ¥2,000 or ¥5,000, set by last month’s turnover rather than by category.

The same rule sets ¥200,000 for categories where the platform carries real risk — phone top-ups, game services, local-life vouchers, fuel cards, cinema — and ¥20,000 for second-hand phones. An experience deposit of ¥5,000 to ¥50,000 applies to computer parts, whole computers, graphics cards and second-hand devices once an order is placed (deposit rule, 8 October 2026).

The rule excludes cross-border (全球购) and instant-retail merchants, which run on their own schedules.

Cross-border has its own card, and it is dearer

Douyin’s 全球购 card runs 1.60% to 6.00% on base rates and 3.70% to 10.00% with supplement, across 145 rows.

Source: cross-border rate schedule, page dated 14 July 2026, same two-column structure as the domestic card.

A shop-type tier sits on top. 专营店 (multi-brand) and 卖场型旗舰店 (retailer flagship) stores pay 6.50% base on apparel, watches, shoes and bags outside the mall app and Doubao, and 5.50% on cosmetics; personal-care sub-categories split between 3.50% and 6.50% (cross-border recruitment rule, 24 September 2026). The domestic card has no equivalent tier.

Taobao and Tmall: a notice, and rates inside a picture

Tmall’s only public statement on category fees this year is a cut notice dated 27 March 2026.

The notice lowers the category software service fee for listed categories from 00:00 on 1 April 2026, and points to a list for the new categories and rates. That list is one PNG, 1552 by 928 pixels, headed 新标准 （2026年4月1日起生效）. Page text stops at the colon, so a reader who strips images sees a notice with no numbers.

The image holds category IDs and rates for online-game cards, digital services, gift cards and video-game software — the rows being cut, not apparel or appliances. I did not transcribe its figures; percentages read off a screenshot are not a source I would publish.

Everything else on Taobao and Tmall sits behind a login. Rule pages under rule.tmall.com served an anonymous visitor a slider-verification wall instead of the rule, and I could not open the help article trade press cites for Taobao’s base fee. Taobao’s 0.6% base fee, capped at ¥60 per sub-order, is what Chinese trade press quotes from the 2024 rule; I could not confirm it on a live page, so it stays single source, second-hand here.

Annual fees are separate. Tmall’s category fee was historically paired with an annual fee of tens of thousands of yuan per category, discounted by sales thresholds. Whether that survives into 2026, I could not establish.

JD answers four questions with two rates

JD’s fee page asks for entity type, shop type, import status and category, then returns a deposit and two percentages for that combination.

The recruitment site’s fee page offers 企业, 个体 and 个人 as entity types; 旗舰店, 专卖店, 专营店 and 普通企业店 as shop types; 非进口 or 进口; and a tree of 64 first-level categories, from 珠宝首饰 and 医药 to 家具 and 家装建材.

One query — defaults 企业, 旗舰店, 非进口, category 家用电器 / 大家电 / 平板电视 — returned a deposit of ¥5,000.00, an operating support service fee of 3.70% and a transaction service fee of 0.60%. The same category under 专营店 gave the same three numbers; what changed was the document asked for, 旗舰店授权书 against 普通授权书.

My first two attempts produced nothing. Clicking a category name drills into its children but leaves the selection count at zero; the checkbox beside the name is what ticks it. With the box ticked, the query answers.

Pinduoduo’s rulebook is behind the login

Pinduoduo’s rules centre answers with a login form, and the onboarding manual it does publish contains documents but no fees.

The merchant self-onboarding manual (version 6.3) lists what an applicant uploads: business licence, legal representative’s ID, shop manager’s ID, and for a flagship store an exclusive brand authorisation. No percentage, deposit or monthly fee appears in its fifteen pages.

One clause is the most useful sentence for a foreign reader: the authorisation can be met by a trademark owner’s wholly owned subsidiary, or by its 境内唯一总代理 — sole agent inside China — which the manual marks as applying only to overseas trademark owners. A foreign brand reaches a Pinduoduo storefront through a mainland company.

One platform bills a separate transaction fee

JD’s result page carries a 交易服务费率 of 0.60% as a line of its own, beside the category rate and the deposit.

Douyin’s cross-border rule says the service fee is taken straight out of the merchant’s goods payment, with no second line for processing (recruitment rule, 24 September 2026). Tmall’s public material states one category rate and nothing else.

The 0.6% circulating in English writing as Alipay’s merchant rate is different, and I could not pin it to a dated official page.

A foreign company sells through the cross-border channel

Douyin admits a foreign company only through 全球购, which needs a mainland entity to carry joint liability.

Three requirements sit in the recruitment rule: an overseas or Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan company with retail or trade qualifications; a mainland subject that bears joint liability, that is, a domestic agent; and a corporate bank account in that overseas jurisdiction (cross-border recruitment rule, 24 September 2026). Goods ship direct or from a bonded warehouse, and 40 first-level categories are open.

Domestic storefronts follow one pattern: a mainland business licence, a legal representative’s ID, and an authorisation chain back to the trademark owner. The company registration note covers what that entity costs to keep; the 1688 buying guide covers skipping it and buying through an agent.

How I checked

Every figure above comes from a platform rule page or platform-published document opened on 18 October 2026, and each carries the date the platform printed on it.

The 269-row schedule was read from the rendered table: each row pulled out of the DOM, merged category cells forward-filled, the placeholder row dropped, then aggregated in Python. The range, median, counts and distribution are my arithmetic; the row-level percentages are the platform’s.

The Tmall list is an image and the JD form wanted a real click on a checkbox, which is what my two failed attempts were about. Login walls are findings here, not gaps to fill from elsewhere: the only alternative for those rates is trade press quoting a rule text, labelled where used.

What I could not check

• Taobao’s 0.6% base fee and the ¥60 cap. I could not open the help-centre article carrying either. The figure appears consistently in Chinese trade reporting of the 2024 rule; I have not seen the rule text.
• Tmall’s rates as numbers. The 27 March 2026 notice points to an image. It is readable to a person, but I did not convert it, so this post carries no Tmall percentage, not even a range.
• Whether Tmall still charges an annual fee. The annual fee of tens of thousands of yuan per category was paired with the category rate in older published tables. Status unverified.
• Whether JD’s rate moves with shop type. One category, two shop types, identical percentages. One sample, not a rule.
• JD’s deposit across categories. The tool returned ¥5,000 for one category; I did not sweep the tree.
• Every Pinduoduo rate and deposit. The rules centre requires a merchant login and the public onboarding manual contains no money figures.
• The payment-channel figure. Alipay’s and WeChat Pay’s standard merchant rates circulate widely; I could not pin either to a dated official page, so neither appears above.
• Douyin’s 全球购 deposit. The domestic rule excludes cross-border merchants; the recruitment rule’s deposit heading carries no figure I could read.
• How often the Douyin card changes. The page is dated 14 July 2026 with no revision history. Trade reporting describes a 2026 increase across several categories, which fits the card, but I did not read that notice.
• Kuaishou. Its fee schedule is public and was cited in the earlier livestream post; not re-read for this table.