How much longer will the 1.5-yuan free-shipping express delivery service last?

Involution will not end out of mercy. Only when express delivery is no longer an affiliate of e-commerce, when service differences can be converted into real monetary gains, and when workers in the last-mile delivery segment get a fair share of the technological dividends, can this industry truly step out of the involution quagmire.

Recently, I ordered a pen on Taobao for 1.52 yuan, with free shipping. A couple of days later, the parcel arrived. I checked and found the origin of shipment was Hubei Province.

The distance from Hubei to Beijing is over 1,000 kilometers. If you drive there by yourself, the highway toll alone would cost more than 500 yuan. When I order a bowl of Lanzhou noodles 3 kilometers away on Meituan, I have to pay a 2.6-yuan delivery fee. How is it possible that an eraser shipped from 1,000 kilometers away can be delivered to my door for free?

When a product is shipped from such a far place, packaging, transportation, sorting and delivery all cost money. But on e-commerce platforms, 1.52-yuan free shipping is not the limit: offers of 1-yuan free shipping and 0.5-yuan free shipping are everywhere. This strange phenomenon on the e-commerce industrial chain is the product of pushing the per-unit fulfillment cost to near the extreme under the maximum scale effect, and the cost to support this model is passed on to the vulnerable links with weak bargaining power in the chain.

Service stations are the first cannon fodder affected in this chain.

01

Service stations crushed by express delivery

"It's been way too long, everyone is exhausted." A franchise outlet owner in Beijing complained on the eve of the 2026 Double 11 shopping festival. In previous years, the impact on outlets during Double 11 was concentrated, and they could catch their breath after gritting their teeth and surviving three to five days. This year, the battle line has been extended to a whole month, but the delay assessments and fines have not been reduced at all.

In Shandong Province, 400 kilometers away, Mr. Wang who runs a Cainiao Station opens the rolling shutter door of his shop sharp at 5 a.m. Thousands of parcels are waiting for him in the delivery van: scanning codes, tearing off old labels, pasting new labels, and placing parcels on shelves, he has to finish a full set of these actions in just a few seconds. His service station covers more than a dozen residential buildings in the surrounding area, and he takes no days off all year round except for the Spring Festival.

But this is not a story where hard work changes fate.

The revenue structure of service stations is very simple: delivery fee multiplied by the number of parcels, the more parcels, the more money they earn. But oddly enough, while the number of parcels at Mr. Wang's service station has been increasing year by year, the unit price has been dropping every year. Nowadays, the delivery fee for Cainiao Station is generally pressed down to 0.4-0.5 yuan per parcel, and the station still has to cover rent, utilities, system service fees, and SMS notification fees. Worse still, the dividend from parcel sending has disappeared: in the past, for the first 1kg weight within the province, users usually paid 10 to 12 yuan for an order, while the cost was about 3 to 4 yuan, and the price difference was an important source of income for the station. Now after unified pricing by the platform, only a meager commission is left, and the profit has shrunk several times.

Meanwhile, his competitors are still increasing. ZTO's Tuxi, YTO's Mama Station, and J&T Neighborhood have sprung up one after another. In a community with 12 residential buildings in Jinan, there are 4 service stations of different brands crowded together.

"There are more and more parcels, why is it getting harder and harder to make money?" Mr. Wang's confusion is a microcosm of the entire logistics industry struggling in the quagmire of involution.

02

How hard is it for a courier to earn 10,000 yuan a month

The phenomenon of "more volume without higher pay" is even more vividly reflected among couriers.

Many consumers online complain that couriers are only willing to leave parcels at service stations instead of delivering them to their doors. In fact, it's not that they don't want to deliver to the door, but the time cost doesn't allow it. The regular delivery fee for couriers of the Tongda courier network is between 0.8 and 1 yuan per parcel, and at the peak of Double 11, the daily delivery volume can rush to 600 to 700 parcels. Many couriers would rather pay to store parcels at service stations, just to save time to deliver more orders.

On the surface, 600 parcels multiplied by 1 yuan is 600 yuan, but 30 to 40 cents will be deducted for each parcel stored at the service station or parcel locker. After covering SMS fees, phone bills and vehicle costs, the net income per day is only 300 to 400 yuan.

And this 300 to 400 yuan is earned by working 12 to 16 hours a day, from 5 or 6 a.m. to 11 or 12 p.m. In this situation, to earn 10,000 yuan a month, you almost have to work nonstop for the whole month.

If you are a new courier who is not familiar with the rules, it is even more difficult to get that 10,000 yuan. Because hidden fines are waiting for you: losing a parcel will result in a 100 to 200 yuan fine, a single complaint will cost hundreds of yuan, if the same-day sign-off rate fails to meet the assessment standard, each delayed parcel will be fined 2 to 3 yuan. The phrase "working for nothing the whole day" is no exaggeration.

03

The headquarters' account book:

Only a few cents profit per parcel

When the story goes to the corporate level, it is even more shocking.

ZTO, YTO, STO and Yunda all adopt the franchise model. Their headquarters are only responsible for the transportation between transit centers, and charge franchise outlets for transit fees, waybill fees and collected delivery fees. After allocating all costs and delivery fees to each parcel, in the first half of 2025, the gross profit per parcel of the four companies was respectively: 0.30 yuan for ZTO, 0.17 yuan for YTO, 0.10 yuan for STO, and 0.13 yuan for Yunda.

The gross profit that the headquarters actually pockets from one express parcel is not even enough to buy a bottle of water.

Such thin profits rely on exchanging price for volume. For every 1 percentage point increase in market share, the capacity utilization rate of the transit center rises, and the unit cost is diluted by a corresponding margin. The one who can push the cost line below that of competitors can survive. Therefore, the headquarters has the incentive to cut prices to grab volume, the franchise outlets bear the loss from price reduction, and the end nodes bear the compressed delivery fees. Every company knows clearly that once they raise prices, customers will flow to competitors. As a result, everyone is trapped in the calculation of "deliver one more parcel, earn a little less".

04

The industry deadlock behind involution

The involution dilemma of the logistics industry stems from three industry deadlocks:

First, homogeneous services leave no pricing power for the players. The products of ZTO, YTO, STO and Yunda are highly similar, and their customers are highly concentrated on e-commerce parcels. E-commerce platforms control the entry and traffic, and use express delivery fees as a bargaining chip for merchant recruitment, constantly pushing prices down. Express companies have almost zero bargaining power against upstream players.

Second, the prisoner's dilemma of the franchise system. The headquarters do not face consumers directly, nor do they hire couriers directly. They are only responsible for transporting parcels from one city to another. It is the franchisees, namely the parcel sending and delivery outlets, that actually collect parcels from merchants and deliver parcels to your door. Once the price war breaks out, the downward pressure of price reduction is passed from the upstream, the bulk of the headquarters' costs are absorbed by franchisees with no bargaining power, and the loss from price reduction eventually falls on the outlets and couriers.

Third, overcapacity meets slowing parcel volume growth. In the past few years, the whole industry has been frantically expanding transit centers and purchasing automated equipment, but the growth rate of parcel volume has dropped to single digits: in the first half of 2026, the national express business volume reached 1003.8 billion parcels, with a year-on-year growth of only 5.0%. The market pie is no longer expanding, while more players are still crowded in the track, making involution inevitable.

05

The policy inflection point against involution

Since the second half of 2025, the State Post Bureau has made special arrangements to govern "involution-style" competition, and many provinces have successively raised express delivery prices. The effect is immediate: in the first quarter of 2026, the national express delivery business revenue increased by 6.8%, outpacing the 5.8% growth of business volume for the first time in nearly two years.

Transmitted to the financial statements, it is an explosive release of profit elasticity. For a business that only earns a few cents per parcel, a 0.1-yuan increase in ticket price can double the profit. In the first half of 2026, STO's attributable net profit is expected to increase by 109%-133%, Yunda's non-recurring profit deducted net profit increased by 105.68%; YTO's attributable net profit in the first three quarters reached 4.63 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 60.9%, and its operating cash flow reached 6.63 billion yuan, approaching positive free cash flow for the first time after covering capital expenditure. ZTO's operating cash flow in the first quarter was 2.789 billion yuan, ranking first among the four companies.

The thinner the base, the longer the leverage. A 2-cent recovery in per-parcel profit corresponds to an incremental net profit of about 520 million yuan for STO.

But this round of recovery first improves the pricing power of the headquarters, not the distribution at the end nodes. Policies have raised the price floor, but they have not automatically raised the delivery fees for service stations and couriers. If the logic of profit distribution remains unchanged, no matter how good the headquarters' financial statements look, the dilemma at the end of the industry will not improve.

06

AI is here, but the dividend hasn't arrived

2026 is known as the "most tech-savvy Double 11". Automated sorting, unmanned vehicles, and intelligent scheduling have pushed the industry efficiency to a new high. ZTO's 3515 unmanned vehicles cover 268 cities, delivering 4 million parcels per day on average; J&T has deployed 346 sets of automated sorting lines in 81 transit centers; STO has put AI digital employees into frontline operations for the first time; the adoption rate of AI-recommended routes exceeds 90%. The overall penetration rate of artificial intelligence in the logistics supply chain has exceeded 37%, and the figure in the transportation link even reaches 78%.

Where did the dividend from efficiency improvement go? A glance at the 2025 account book can reveal the clue: ZTO's cost related to direct customer business increased by 5.728 billion yuan in one year, and its annual gross margin dropped from 31% to 25%. The saved cost was passed on to the low-price competition of e-commerce platforms in the next step.

AI does not let practitioners get a bigger share of the pie, but instead accelerates the process of "machines replacing humans". If efficiency improvement is not accompanied by a pricing mechanism for differentiated services, the result will be: the headquarters earns the money from efficiency, while the cost of transformation is still shared by the outlets and couriers.

07

Who will break the involution?

So where is the future of the express delivery industry? How long will involution last? Lu Jiu's judgment is: the first half of the price war is over. In the second half, it will not be a single company or a certain technology that breaks the involution, but the combined force of three forces.

The first force: the price bottom line set by regulation. The essence of anti-involution is to oppose the low-price model that sacrifices quality and the interests of practitioners. Policies forcibly raise the price floor. The profit recovery in the first half of 2026 has proved that what this industry lacks is not demand, but a proper pricing order.

The second force: differentiated services, so that "good service" can be sold at a good price. After STO acquired Danniao, its time-sensitive express revenue increased by about 263% in one year, making it the only company with positive growth in per-parcel revenue among the Tongda network; YTO invested 12.2 billion yuan to build the Jiaxing aviation hub, shifting from land transportation to integrated land and air transportation; in 2025, ZTO's direct customer return parcel business increased by 111.8%. SF Express' average per-parcel revenue is 14.4 yuan, more than six times that of the Tongda network, and it still operates very well — this proves that the market is willing to pay for service certainty. In the future, the express delivery industry will definitely divide into economy class and business class just like the aviation industry: the extreme low-price parcels with free shipping will go for self-pickup at service stations, while parcels whose customers are willing to pay for timeliness and door-to-door delivery will have a unit price starting from 3 to 4 yuan.

The third force: rebalancing of the end-node operation model. Diversification of door-to-door delivery and self-pickup, as well as differentiated delivery fees, is the only way to make couriers "human beings" again instead of "machines". The "slower express delivery" perceived by consumers during the Double 11 period is actually the growing pain in this rebalancing process.

08

Conclusion

This year's Double 11, the express delivery industry stands at a strange crossroads: the profits of the headquarters are recovering, while individual workers at the end nodes are still struggling; AI is creating efficiency, but also eliminating jobs; regulation is propping up the price floor, while e-commerce platforms are still pushing prices down.

Involution will not end out of mercy. Only when express delivery is no longer an affiliate of e-commerce, when service differences can be converted into real monetary gains, and when workers in the last-mile delivery segment get a fair share of the technological dividends, can this industry truly step out of the involution quagmire. Before that, parcels during Double 11 will keep pouring in year after year, and the 3-cent gross profit per order, the 0.5-yuan delivery fee per parcel, are still asking a silent question: is efficiency serving people, or are people serving efficiency?

This article is from the WeChat official account "Lu Jiu Finance" (ID: liujiucaijing69), written by Haohao, authorized for release by 36Kr.