3 ms·

I live in China and run startups in e-commerce and food. China subsidizes up to 70% of postage fee, so Aliexpress sellers can sell cheap stuff for $2 with "fre

by mstaoru 10y ago

I live in China and run startups in e-commerce and food. China subsidizes up to 70% of postage fee, so Aliexpress sellers can sell cheap stuff for $2 with "free shipping" worldwide. There is no such thing as "free shipping" in e-commerce, it's just included in the price. An astonishing amount of people actually thinks it's free for the seller. When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root access to the Ministry of Information. Most of the time it's handled by your hoster "transparently" in the form of "license application tokens". (Yes, you can trick them if you colocate your own bare metal.) 25% is an average ingredient cost for restaurant meals.

comboy 10y ago
> When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root access to the Ministry of Information. Wow, I'd like to know more, this seems especially interesting in regard to Chinese Bitcoin exchanges. They can keep most of their bitcoins in cold storage, but still having root access to the web server means user passwords, TLs, and so on. Is it just a web server directly connected to the internet that they need to have root access to? Or do you e.g. also need to provide access to the db server used? edit: Also what's with the license? It's possible for me to buy hosting in China without any licenses.
contingencies 10y ago
Shipping: It's generally pricey as hell to send anything out of the US. It's cheap to send things from developing countries. This is merely economic reality (shipping costs include cost of packaging, labor salary/health/pension, rent at all trans-shipment points, distance-to-port, economies of scale, tax on private company earnings, legal and insurance overheads, etc.) Since half the world's products come from China, its government-run mail system has no taxes and it has huge ports and rail networks, it's very cheap. I doubt there is a gov.cn conspiracy to undermine foreign e-tailers (ready to be proven wrong!), it's just a highly efficient and centralized socialist bureaucratic mail system. (Note that it's currently being supplanted both domestically and internationally for many purposes by more trackable courier companies, of which there are many dozens already, the best of which is http://sf-express.com/ http://sf-express.com/ ) Root: If you do business in mainland China the government reserves the right to strongly suggest you comply with everything they want, which is usually "if anti-government stuff appears on your site, you are done, and otherwise if we give you a phone call, jump high now". This is in some ways no different to other countries in model, but perhaps stronger in presumed responsibility and penalty than some. As for root-by-VPS, yeah maybe, but citation-needed, and there's arguably not a huge difference versus seizure as performed by other countries. (Source: ~16 years ... not claiming total accuracy, the above is just my experience/impression)
anilgulecha 10y ago
Countries have an obligation, via their publically-funded postal agencies to deliver any mail/courier to their citizens. This was fine pre-internet as roughly same amount of mail was sent as received on average -- so countries invested roughly the same amount of manpower. But in the case of china/Ali-express, it receives maybe 1 for every 100 mails it sends out, which means receiving countries use proportionally much larger manpower to distribute the mail, and this is via tax-payer funds. So interestingly, that you yourself end up paying for china's free shipping, via your home-country taxes.

by mstaoru 10y ago

comboy 10y ago

> When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root access to the Ministry of Information. Wow, I'd like to know more, this seems especially interesting in regard to Chinese Bitcoin exchanges. They can keep most of their bitcoins in cold storage, but still having root access to the web server means user passwords, TLs, and so on. Is it just a web server directly connected to the internet that they need to have root access to? Or do you e.g. also need to provide access to the db server used? edit: Also what's with the license? It's possible for me to buy hosting in China without any licenses.

contingencies 10y ago

Shipping: It's generally pricey as hell to send anything out of the US. It's cheap to send things from developing countries. This is merely economic reality (shipping costs include cost of packaging, labor salary/health/pension, rent at all trans-shipment points, distance-to-port, economies of scale, tax on private company earnings, legal and insurance overheads, etc.) Since half the world's products come from China, its government-run mail system has no taxes and it has huge ports and rail networks, it's very cheap. I doubt there is a gov.cn conspiracy to undermine foreign e-tailers (ready to be proven wrong!), it's just a highly efficient and centralized socialist bureaucratic mail system. (Note that it's currently being supplanted both domestically and internationally for many purposes by more trackable courier companies, of which there are many dozens already, the best of which is http://sf-express.com/ http://sf-express.com/ ) Root: If you do business in mainland China the government reserves the right to strongly suggest you comply with everything they want, which is usually "if anti-government stuff appears on your site, you are done, and otherwise if we give you a phone call, jump high now". This is in some ways no different to other countries in model, but perhaps stronger in presumed responsibility and penalty than some. As for root-by-VPS, yeah maybe, but citation-needed, and there's arguably not a huge difference versus seizure as performed by other countries. (Source: ~16 years ... not claiming total accuracy, the above is just my experience/impression)

anilgulecha 10y ago

Countries have an obligation, via their publically-funded postal agencies to deliver any mail/courier to their citizens. This was fine pre-internet as roughly same amount of mail was sent as received on average -- so countries invested roughly the same amount of manpower. But in the case of china/Ali-express, it receives maybe 1 for every 100 mails it sends out, which means receiving countries use proportionally much larger manpower to distribute the mail, and this is via tax-payer funds. So interestingly, that you yourself end up paying for china's free shipping, via your home-country taxes.