Wish and other ecommerce sites delivering from China are building their own global freight networks after the USPS raised its international rates in July
Ryan McMorrow / Financial Times : Tweets: @financialtimes and @ftchina Tweets: @financialtimes : Shopping sites in China are rushing to build their own freight networks in the run up to Christmas as the pandemic and new US shipping rules threaten the supply of packages https://www.ft.com/... @ftchina : Shopping sites in China are rushing to build their own global freight networks after the US struck a deal for higher international postage fees https://www.ft.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Wish is following a playbook Amazon wrote years earlier. After [[a:862306|rising package volumes pushed Amazon to seek alternative delivery routes and strain its UPS relationship]], Amazon built out its own global network — by 2019 it was delivering nearly half its own US packages, a shift tracked in Rakuten's data on Amazon's self-delivery share. Now the July USPS international rate increase has made the postal channel expensive enough that China-based marketplaces are doing the same.
The stakes extend beyond one rate change: later coverage shows Western demand for goods sold by Chinese platforms is already buoying air freight rates, and the EU has since moved toward stricter customs checks and fees for Chinese e-commerce shipments — meaning the private-freight buildout is happening against both rising demand and tightening regulatory scrutiny.
First-order effects
- Wish and similar China-based sites regain control of their landed cost per package, insulating their cross-border pricing from future USPS rate decisions that previously flowed straight into their unit economics.
- USPS loses high-volume international parcel revenue from exactly the shippers most sensitive to the July increase, deepening the erosion of its package business.
Second-order effects
- Air cargo carriers and freight forwarders gain a new class of anchor customers as marketplace-owned networks buy capacity directly — consistent with the freight-rate pressure already reported from Temu- and Shein-driven demand.
- Rivals without owned logistics, including other AliExpress-style platforms, face pressure to match the vertical integration or absorb the higher postal rates in margins, while Amazon's third-party shipping arm — already courting Etsy and Walmart per related coverage — becomes a potential counter-offer.
Third-order effects
- If high-volume shippers keep bypassing national posts, the century-old model of subsidized postal channels for cross-border commerce gives way to privately negotiated freight, weakening the leverage postal operators have historically had over small-parcel pricing.
- Regulators respond where the packages flow: the EU's customs-check proposal signals that as Chinese platforms own more of their logistics, oversight shifts from postal intermediaries to the platforms themselves.
The trend: Cross-border e-commerce is migrating from subsidized national-postal channels to vertically integrated private freight networks, with each rate hike or customs rule accelerating the shift.