The profit calculation that sinks new resellers is rarely the product price. It is the freight, because “free shipping” on a 1688 listing means free to a template boundary rather than free to your customer, and the difference is charged at checkout.
What “free shipping” actually covers
Managed listings ship on an official template covering roughly fifty core cities, per the platform’s own announcement carried on wiki.1688.com; everywhere else uses the seller’s own rules. That is why the same item can be free to a buyer in Ningbo and carry an 8–15 yuan surcharge to one in Kashgar. The template boundary is not marked on the product page — it only shows up when someone enters a destination. Which makes the single most useful habit on 1688 the least common one: run the seller’s own freight calculator before you commit to a price. It lives under the service section of the product detail page, it takes a destination, and it produces the number your margin is actually made of. A seller on official-warehouse fulfilment spreads this across a national network, which is worth preferring over a seller with their own rules and a cheap-looking template.
Weight steps, and why a light product is not a cheap shipment
Domestic freight on 1688 is quoted in steps, not per kilo. A parcel under 1kg is commonly 5 yuan; the same item at 3kg can reach 12. That is not a bad faith structure — a courier sorting by weight band bills each band separately, and the second kilogram costs disproportionately more to move because it pushes the parcel into a heavier handling tier. The practical consequence is that products which look cheap per unit get punished twice: once in the step, and again in volumetric weight once you are shipping them onward rather than domestically. Which is the part most first-time sellers forget entirely. A product chosen because it is light in the hand can still be the most expensive thing in your inventory to move internationally, because the box it arrives in is much larger than the item. Our extension prices that second leg per line with the carrier’s own divisor, so a cheap-looking item with a bulky box does not quietly become the expensive one.
Returns double the freight, and you pay it first
The cost that never appears in a listing is the return leg. If your customer sends something back, you are the one who advances the return postage to the seller, and only recover it if the seller accepts the claim — which is a negotiation, not a rule. One return can therefore turn a thin margin negative, and it hits hardest on exactly the low-price items a new seller is most likely to be selling. This is the argument for pricing with 8–12% of headroom rather than to the last cent. It is not pessimism; it is the same reason a shop keeps a float for refunds. If a category cannot carry that margin, the shipping calculator will tell you so before the first customer does.
FAQ
Does “free shipping” mean I can price without a shipping calculator?
No. Free shipping covers a template boundary — about fifty core cities on managed listings — and your customer may well be outside it. The surcharge is 8–15 yuan in practice, and it is charged at checkout, after you have already committed to a selling price. Run the seller’s calculator with the destination you actually ship to. It takes a minute, and it is the difference between a margin that survives and one that does not.
How much margin headroom should I keep?
Between 8% and 12% of the selling price, which is roughly what the platform guidance itself suggests. It covers the remote-area surcharge, the weight step you did not predict, and the return you have to fund. If your product cannot carry that, it is not a bad product — it is a category where the freight structure leaves you no room for being wrong once, and that is worth knowing before you order rather than after.
Does international freight change this calculation?
It is the larger half. The domestic leg to the agent’s warehouse is what this page is about, typically ¥5–12. The international leg is priced per kilometre per kilo, per line, and is usually the biggest single number in the whole chain — and it is decided by chargeable weight, which for a light bulky product can be several times its actual weight. That is why we built the comparison around the landed total rather than the service fee, and why the extension shows you the line rather than a single price. Both legs are chargeable; only one of them is visible in the listing.