Weihai City is actively innovating in the field of cross-border e-commerce. By taking the lead in launching cross-border e-commerce retail export goods return pilots across customs zones and setting up return central warehouses, it has directly addressed industry pain points such as high return costs, long cycles, and difficult disposal, providing strong support for cross-border e-commerce companies to “sell globally.”
Entering the Weihai International Logistics Park located in Weihai Lingang District, the cross-border e-commerce export returns center warehouse is operating efficiently.
Here, a product returned from South Korea can be sorted, inspected, released and sent to domestic merchants in less than 10 minutes.
This is also the second cross-border e-commerce export return center warehouse in the country and the first in the northern region.
“In the past, overseas consumers made returns, and many products were left overseas, causing huge losses, because the value of many goods itself was far lower than the logistics costs incurred by the return. Now these overseas return packages can be returned to China collectively and undergo secondary sorting, which saves us money and worry.” said Chu Yansong, head of Weihai Gangming E-Commerce Industrial Park Co., Ltd.
As the first pilot project in the province to undertake the return of cross-border e-commerce retail export goods across customs zones, Weihai has broken the reliance on traditional return routes and added two customs clearance lines to realize a new operating model of “centralized return and unified disposal” of return packages, significantly reducing logistics costs and time costs.
“It used to be that when returning cross-border e-commerce export goods, they had to rely on the original route of the original port. For example, cross-border e-commerce goods exported from Shanghai must be returned to the Shanghai port when they are returned. Now we have built a return central warehouse channel, and different ports across the country can return them through Weihai Port. The overall return time has been reduced from 40 days to 7 days, and the return time has been increased by about 80%.” An Pengbo, assistant manager of the e-commerce operation center of Weihai International Logistics Park, said.
Behind efficient operation, it is inseparable from the support of a complete regulatory system.
Here, companies can send returned packages directly to the central warehouse, tally them first, and then classify and declare them according to the actual situation of the goods. The customs supervision process is seamlessly embedded, which greatly reduces logistics time and costs.
Pan Jihong, director of the Weihai Customs Post Office Office, said: “We have established a complete return package quality supervision system by formulating a standardized supervision plan, establishing a commodity quality traceability system, and equipping intelligent monitoring facilities to ensure that our returned goods are ‘fast, manageable, and safe to return.'”
In 2025, Weihai’s cross-border e-commerce import and export volume will be nearly 16 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of more than 20%. The scale of cross-border e-commerce import and export to South Korea ranks first in the country.
At present, the number of cross-border e-commerce market entities in Weihai has exceeded 1,000.
Weihai Municipal Commerce Bureau Party Committee Member and Deputy Director Zhang Liankai said: “We will give full play to our geographical advantages over South Korea, with the goal of building a cross-border e-commerce logistics hub city in Northeast Asia, and build a two-way logistics channel with ‘freedom in advance and retreat’ to attract more mainstream cross-border e-commerce platform companies to use central warehouses to carry out returns business, accelerate the construction of cross-border e-commerce collection points, cultivate and expand various market entities and specialty industries, and continue to activate new momentum for foreign trade growth.”
