This is the second in a two-part series on the culture of China’s e-commerce boom. Part one can be found here.

Ten years ago, not long after I took a job as a customer service agent for an online store in the eastern Chinese e-commerce hub of Yiwu, my boss pulled me aside for a reality check. Seeing that I’d spent the past 10 minutes tied up in a conversation with a potential customer from China’s far northwest who was haggling over our shipping fees, he quickly told me to end the conversation and ignore the buyer. “What are you talking with them for?” he asked. “There’s no money to be made in orders from places like that unless you charge extra for shipping. Besides, they’re all a hassle.”

China’s e-commerce firms are world leaders in logistics, capable of delivering products almost anywhere in the country quickly and efficiently. As a Ph.D. student working on the country’s e-commerce boom, I had joined the company in hopes of getting a firsthand look at the system’s inner workings. What I found suggests that the benefits of this network are not always evenly distributed.

While I was initially surprised by my boss’ blunt dismissal of an entire region, over the course of a decade spent conducting fieldwork in the e-commerce industry, I’ve come to realize that shipping fees are a highly sensitive topic for sellers and buyers alike. To understand why, imagine dropping a stone into a still pond. The point of impact is Yiwu in the eastern Chinese province of Zheijiang — the geographic heart of China’s massive e-commerce industry and the city with the highest volume of express deliveries in the country. The circles rippling out from the splash each represent a different shipping zone. The first ring is what’s known in Chinese as the baoyou qu, “or free shipping zone,” which roughly encompasses the eastern regions of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Shanghai. From there, each additional circle represents a step up in cost. The further a customer is from the free shipping zone, the more expensive and time-consuming their delivery becomes.

This isn’t a perfect metaphor: Buyers in large, economically prosperous regions like Beijing or the southern province of Guangdong enjoy lower shipping costs due to economies of scale. Practices also vary from store to store: some sellers will include the less wealthy province of Anhui, near Zhejiang, in their free-shipping zones, while others charge the normal shipping rate.

But it is a hierarchy that is nevertheless widely accepted and understood in China: Residents of Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang will sometimes jokingly introduce themselves as being from the free shipping zone, while sellers often write off faraway regions as being not worth the “hassle” of doing business.

Liu, who runs an online hardware store in Yiwu, is an illustrative example. (To protect the identities of my research participants, I’ve given them all pseudonyms.) Hanging from the wall of his office is a map of China, which he described as a business necessity. Referring to the map, he can quickly quote shipping rates and times based on a buyer’s location within a series of imagined concentric circles. Although the calculations are not always accurate — they don’t take into account factors such as terrain or shipping frequency — as far as Liu is concerned, the circles are as real as any geographic feature.

It’s not just a matter of cost. While I was working as a customer service agent at the above-mentioned online store, a co-worker explained to me that the long distances and transportation times involved meant that buyers further away tended to ask more questions and, more often, about logistics progress. “You can’t make much money selling to them, and they require more time and effort,” he told me. “Then, as soon as they feel that your service isn’t good enough, they leave a bad review — it’s like trying to carry water in a sieve. Plus, there’s a higher chance of breakages or lost items when shipping long distances, meaning you need to send a replacement, so you lose even more.”

Indeed, many customer service agents actively try to avoid clients in remote regions, disengaging at the first sign the customer might be too demanding.

Some adopt even more extreme methods. Take Zhou, the owner of an online storefront selling stockings and leggings store in Yiwu, for example. Her focus on cheap products means the quality of the goods she sources can also be a mixed bag. When I worked in her store, one of my tasks was sorting through products with defects such as loose threads and faded colors. Officially, this was done in order to return them to the manufacturer, but in practice, things were different. I found that during promotional activities, such as events organized by e-commerce platforms offering free shipping on all purchases over 9.9 yuan ($1.40), the store would send defective products to customers outside the free shipping zone.

Zhou later explained to me that this was because customers in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai are more experienced, and therefore more familiar with platforms’ return and complaint processes. When coupled with their easy access to cheap shipping, customers there are more likely to return products that are faulty. Meanwhile, the process of returning goods takes much longer in more remote provinces, and many shoppers there are unaware of the platform rule that the seller must pay for shipping to return goods with quality problems, so they’re more likely to suffer in silence.

In some cases, Zhou would cancel purchases under the premise that the item was “out of stock.” Such behavior violates platform rules and harms the interests of consumers, but Zhou didn’t see her actions as problematic. “My courier service doesn’t include those provinces, so the courier has to calculate the shipping cost differential one by one when he picks up the packages,” she explained. “Delivery to other places doesn’t have all that hassle — I box everything, and the courier just has to count the parcels.”

Of course, the consumers most affected by these practices are not ignorant of sellers’ behavior. While I was conducting fieldwork in western China, many local consumers complained to me that they not only had to pay more for shipping when they bought goods online, but that they were also treated disrespectfully. For these consumers, the e-commerce economy has not de-regionalized China’s economy; instead, it has replicated existing regional inequalities to their disadvantage.

To reduce discriminatory practices, platforms, and consumer rights protection bodies should ensure that adequate supervision of the industry, and companies should understand that the only way to sustain a long-term business is by operating ethically and guaranteeing the equal rights of all consumers. That being said, we cannot ignore the underlying economic rationale for the disparity in treatment: China still has significant imbalances in industrial development, population distribution, and transportation infrastructure across different regions. This theme came up again and again in my interviews with sellers, who were plainly uninterested in picking up the tab. The government has made creating a “unified national market” a key priority, but delivering on that promise — while protecting the interests of both buyers and sellers — will take time.

Translator: David Ball, editor: Cai Yineng.

(Header image: Visuals from the Ministry of Natural Resources and VCG)