I spent an afternoon opening the merchant fee pages of Douyin, Taobao, Tmall, JD and Pinduoduo as an anonymous visitor. One of them publishes a full rate card. One publishes a notice with the rates inside a PNG. One answers a four-field form. The other two stop at a login.
That distribution is the story: in Chinese e-commerce, the fee is public only when the platform decides to make it public, and the form of publication tells you how comparable the numbers are.
Full tables and the per-platform notes are on my site: What Chinese e-commerce platforms charge a merchant. This post is the short version.
Douyin is the only full card
Douyin publishes a category technical service fee schedule dated 14 July 2026: 269 category rows, base rates from 0.30% (phone top-ups) to 10.00% (a catch-all services row), median total 6.90%.
Those aggregates are mine, not the platform's. I pulled each row out of the rendered DOM, forward-filled the merged category cells, dropped the one placeholder row with no category and a 0.00% rate, then computed the range, median and distribution in Python. The row-level percentages are Douyin's; the arithmetic is mine.
Two columns matter. The base rate comes from the category you list in. A second column adds up to 5.20 percentage points when the order arrives through the Douyin Mall app or Doubao. On 98 of the 269 rows the supplement equals the base exactly, so the same apparel category is 5.00% in a livestream and 10.00% in mall search. On 151 rows the supplement is 1.3x the base, which is where the 4.60%, 6.90% and 9.20% totals come from.
Deposits follow last month's turnover, not the category: ¥500 up to ¥50,000 GMV, ¥2,000 to ¥100,000, ¥5,000 above that. Categories the platform considers risky — top-ups, game services, fuel cards, cinema — carry ¥200,000; second-hand phones ¥20,000.
Tmall: a notice that points at an image
Tmall's only public statement on category fees this year is a cut notice dated 27 March 2026. It says the rates change from 1 April and points to a list of new categories and rates. That list is one PNG, 1552 by 928 pixels.
I did not transcribe it. Percentages read off a screenshot are not a source I would publish, and the rows being cut are online-game cards, digital services, gift cards and video-game software — not apparel or appliances.
Taobao's 0.6% base fee, capped at ¥60 per sub-order, circulates in Chinese trade press from the 2024 rule. I could not open the help-centre article carrying it, so on my site it stays labelled second-hand.
JD answers with a form
JD's recruitment site asks for entity type, shop type, import status and category, then returns three numbers. One query — 企业, 旗舰店, 非进口, 家用电器 / 大家电 / 平板电视 — returned a ¥5,000.00 deposit, an operating support service fee of 3.70% and a transaction service fee of 0.60%.
Two failed attempts taught me the interaction: clicking a category name drills into its children but leaves the selection count at zero. The checkbox beside the name is what ticks it.
Pinduoduo: the rulebook is behind the login
The rules centre answers with a login form. The public onboarding manual (version 6.3, fifteen pages) lists documents, not money: business licence, legal representative's ID, shop manager's ID, brand authorisation. No percentage, deposit or monthly fee.
One clause is useful for a foreign brand: authorisation can come from a trademark owner's wholly owned subsidiary, or from its 境内唯一总代理 — sole agent inside China — which the manual marks as applying only to overseas trademark owners. In practice a foreign brand reaches a Pinduoduo storefront through a mainland company.
The number that is not comparable
A headline rate is only comparable if both sides compute it on the same base. Douyin's settlement base is what the buyer paid including shipping, plus host coupons, platform coupons and subsidies, minus the merchant-funded parts. JD reports a category rate and a separate 0.60% transaction fee. Tmall states one category rate in a picture and nothing else.
So "Douyin charges 5%" and "JD charges 3.7%" are not two points on one scale. They are two different objects, published in two different forms, on two different bases.
What I could not check
- Tmall's rates as numbers: the notice points to an image.
- Taobao's 0.6% base fee and ¥60 cap: trade press only, no live rule page I could open.
- Whether Tmall still charges an annual fee: the old tables paired it with the category rate; status unverified in 2026.
- Every Pinduoduo rate and deposit: merchant login required.
- Alipay's and WeChat Pay's standard merchant rates: they circulate widely, but I could not pin either to a dated official page, so neither appears.
The full page has the 269-row breakdown, the cross-border card (145 rows, 1.60%–6.00% base), the deposit rule and the source links, each with the date the platform printed on it: notebookfield.com/posts/platform-commission-rates.
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