Hebei e-commerce enterprises go head-to-head against Pinduoduo

Pinduoduo's strongest rival, the Hebei Involution Network, has gone viral.

The shampoo priced at 18 yuan drops directly to 1.8 yuan with free shipping once it arrives at a warehouse in Hebei; the 8-yuan pack of tissue you stayed up late to grab in a live stream can be obtained for just 0.8 yuan at a wholesale stall in Baoding... It's believed that many people have scrolled across similar videos on Douyin in recent days, introducing the Hebei Involution Network.

The website features a simple, pure AI-style design and very straightforward functions. It mainly gathers factories and merchants from all over Hebei, somewhat resembling the early free yellow pages, where users can check production origins, find manufacturers, and learn about industrial belts. Probably due to the keywords "involution" and "Hebei" that come with natural topic attributes, shortly after its launch, the website has recorded tens of millions of visits and hundreds of thousands of registered enterprises.

According to the website's introduction, its positioning is to further organize information of Hebei's industries and factories, so that purchasers can conduct self-service retrieval, comparison, and directly contact factories for bulk procurement and long-term cooperation. The website even specially emphasizes the "direct connection" rule: no matchmaking, no quotation, no guarantee, no commission charging, no ranking selling, and no paid certification.

According to reports from some media, hundreds of people may be creating such "involution network" platforms right now. One of the more influential ones has now been renamed "Hebei Factory Network", possibly due to regulatory impacts. The government work report has clearly proposed long ago to "thoroughly rectify 'involution-style' competition". In response, the founder of a relevant website said that "involution" is a kind of self-mockery, and what they want to do more is to help factory owners in Hebei get rid of involution.

"We will respond to every price war"

When it comes to small commodities, many people will naturally associate Yiwu, Zhejiang, but when it comes to pricing, Hebei is the real leader.

There is a very interesting business in Hebei called "online supply". Simply put, it organizes scattered family workshops and individual online stores, gathers fragmented orders for online stores one by one, which is jokingly called "Pin Hao Bao" in the industry. The ex-factory prices of these Hebei "online supply" providers are even lower than those of Yiwu merchants, so that some Yiwu merchants simply no longer source goods themselves, but directly pick up goods from Hebei and transport them back to Yiwu for resale at a markup. Merchants who originally did wholesale business have been forced by Hebei e-commerce practitioners to become "resellers".

Now, these "resellers" have built a platform on their own: the Hebei Involution Network. Anyone who wants first-hand low-cost sources of goods can find them directly by logging on to this website.

However, it is no longer called "Hebei Involution Network" now, and has been renamed "Hebei Factory Network". The operator is Weima Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. According to the website introduction, this is a public project launched by the company for Hebei's industries, open for free, and the company's main business is independent of the website's information collection, sorting and demand forwarding services.

In terms of business scope, Weima Technology is mainly engaged in software development, overseas independent station operation, and AI Agent development and implementation. The "Hebei Factory Network" is a new attempt that the company has developed and tested in the past few months. At present, the mini-program has been open to suppliers, purchasers and individual buyers in 11 prefecture-level cities across Hebei. Whether it is sourcing goods, selling products, conducting bulk procurement, or negotiating online, all operations can be completed directly within the WeChat ecosystem.

Building such a website is not difficult, and AI can complete it in two days. At the beginning, many developers made similar products, and mini-programs, APPs and other related products have been launched one after another.

"We will respond to every price war, and e-commerce has no other tricks to use." A friend of mine who runs a jewelry business in Xiong'an New Area, Hebei told me that his 4mm round jasper beads made of Xinjiang Hotan jasper, with a total length of 56cm, are sold for 290 yuan per piece, and products of the same quality can hardly be found on other platforms.

This friend also learned about the Hebei Involution Network, but he told me that he doesn't like the label "involution", because it will make people think that Hebei only sells cheap goods, which will instead make their business more and more difficult.

"Lose money for two years, just to build reputation"

Indeed, the popularity of the Hebei Involution Network is related to the word "involution" to a certain extent, which reflects the normalized existence of "low-price competition" in Hebei's manufacturing industry, and hits the real long-term predicament that Hebei's factories have been facing.

Hebei locals like to say a saying: "As long as it is more profitable than farming, it is good enough."

For those who leave their hometowns to work in Beijing or southern China, there may be more opportunities in the outside world; but for those who do not want to leave or cannot leave their hometowns, their choices are rather limited. Many people eventually stay in towns and villages, either working in factories, or trying to take orders and run small factories on their own.

They free up several rooms in their yard, buy several machines, and the couple start running the business first. When there are more orders, they will ask relatives, neighbors or fellow villagers for help. Their houses can be directly used as workshops, no extra rent is needed; family members work together, which can also save part of the labor cost. In this way, a factory grows gradually.

After one factory is established, it becomes easier for the next one to emerge. This model means extremely high flexibility when the market is performing well. But when more and more people enter the same industry, the advantages are no longer that obvious.

Some new merchants who just entered the industry plan to "lose money for two years just to build reputation" in order to accumulate customers first. In order to retain existing customers, the original factories have to follow to cut prices. Some people cannot make profits in a short period of time and finally choose to quit, and their remaining inventory will be cleared at a low price. Customers come back with the clearance price and ask: "Others can sell at this price, why can't you?"

Then the quotation is lowered a little bit. This is the recurring cycle that easily occurs in many industrial clusters in Hebei: new players enter, old players exit, but the production capacity always remains in the market; orders do not increase significantly, but there are more and more competitors.

The cost advantage originally created by industrial clusters is gradually consumed in such competitions. Factory rent has been saved, labor can be arranged flexibly, raw materials come from mature local supply chains, and logistics is sufficiently convenient. In the end, there are fewer and fewer costs that can be further reduced. If you continue to cut costs, you can only reduce the operator's own profit, even the raw materials, craftsmanship and quality of the products themselves.

Baigou in Baoding, Hebei is a typical sample. It is the largest luggage production and marketing base in China, with an annual output of about 1 billion pieces of luggage. Despite the amazing production capacity, it has never had a well-known independent brand recognized by the public. Gao Yongli, vice president of Baigou Luggage Industry Association, said in an interview with CCTV: Everyone feels difficult in the past two years. The scale has expanded, but the profit has become thinner instead.

Therefore, the "involution" in Hebei is not just low-price competition full of commercial malice. It is more like a result jointly driven by the industrial structure and survival mode: it is not difficult to enter an industry, but it is getting harder and harder to survive in it; everyone is trying to reduce costs, but when everyone's cost has been reduced to a very low level, the only thing left to compete for is who can earn a little less than others.

No Hebei business owner wants to be the "Involution King"

When many people learn about the existence of the "Hebei Involution Network", their first reaction is: Is this platform trying to build another Pinduoduo?

From the perspective of business logic, this idea is not unreasonable. Direct supply from manufacturers can theoretically reduce intermediate links, and the price may even be lower than that of goods on existing platforms. For Hebei merchants who have long been trapped in low-price competition, if they can bypass the platforms and directly connect factories with consumers, it seems that they can regain part of the pricing power.

However, the reality is not as easy as imagined. It should be known that e-commerce platforms like Pinduoduo are no longer simple "traffic intermediaries". A complete set of transaction infrastructure, ranging from payment, logistics, customer service, after-sales service, to return and exchange, consumer protection and dispute resolution, has been packaged into the commodity price. Consumers are willing to pay for this certainty, while a single factory can hardly afford the service cost of the same scale independently.

Besides, the products in many industrial belts of Hebei are of low unit price. If consumers buy goods worth thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan, bypassing the platform to directly contact the manufacturer for a price difference of several hundred yuan may be enough for consumers to bear some transaction costs. But if it is just small commodities priced at a few or more than ten yuan, the money saved may not even cover the trouble of communication, logistics and after-sales service.

Judging from the current situation, this attempt still has a long way to go before it can truly grow into a large-scale trading platform. The popularity of the "Hebei Involution Network" is declining. Compared with the attention it received when it was first launched, the traffic has decreased significantly now. After I joined the investment promotion group of Hebei E-commerce Involution Network, I also found that the transaction atmosphere in the group is not very active, and there are almost no new transaction information for several consecutive days.

Therefore, the real problem that Hebei's industrial belts need to face is not "how to build another Pinduoduo", but how to get rid of the dependence on low-price traffic.

This is also the part that deserves real attention in the "anti-involution" initiative. The 2026 government work report has proposed to "thoroughly rectify 'involution-style' competition". Last September, the National Development and Reform Commission and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly issued a relevant notice, further focusing on the disorderly low-price competition in key industrial product fields, giving reminders and warnings to operators suspected of disorderly low-price competition, and carrying out cost investigations when necessary. The governance of disorderly low-price competition at the policy level is moving from advocacy to more specific institutional arrangements.

A large number of small and medium-sized factories in Hebei are not lacking in production capacity, but lack stable orders and larger markets. Many factories obtain orders through wholesalers, old customers or e-commerce platforms. The production end can achieve fast delivery and low cost, but who to sell the products to and how to enter a larger market has become a more difficult problem to solve.

"A single website can't solve any problems, it's just a fleeting trend." A Hebei e-commerce practitioner told me. In his opinion, the real difficulty for Hebei's e-commerce industry is not the lack of such a platform, but the fact that a more benign business model other than low-price competition has not been found for a long time. "No Hebei business owner wants to be the 'Involution King'." he said.

This article is from WeChat official account"Dongsi Shitiao Capital" (ID: DsstCapital), written by Wei Xianghui, published with authorization from 36Kr.