In mid-2025 Jiang Ling opened a 200-square-metre women's clothing shop in Ningbo's Yinzhou district, not as a retreat from retail but as a strategic pivot. She arrived there with ten years of experience running a mass-market Taobao store: a weekly cadence of sourcing, shooting and uploading that once yielded steady platform traffic and grew her following to roughly 80,000.
That rhythm broke down after 2024. Jiang describes a sharp rise in return rates across the low‑price women's apparel segment — from an industry norm near 20% to episodes of 70–80% — which transformed high turnover into a loss-making exercise. Each returned item forces sellers to re‑calculate real costs: restocking, repackaging, warehousing and logistics. For low-margin merchants, high volumes no longer compensate for the surging operational drag.
The mechanics behind the problem are familiar to Chinese merchants: visual deception, rampant image reuse and a culture of impulse purchasing. Many sellers post non‑studio or stolen images, which translates into garments that “don't match the picture.” Consumers, energised by short‑form content and live commerce, buy more impulsively than before — sometimes to try and return — further inflating return ratios and eroding sellers' margins.
Platform dynamics have compounded the squeeze. Short‑video apps and content platforms have diverted traffic away from traditional marketplaces, prompting platforms to reward ever‑lower prices and ever‑more intensive engagement. Jiang says merchants are forced to react constantly to new rules: midnight reply requirements, mandated live‑stream hours and episodic price wars. For small sellers, keeping up with these shifting incentives is a costly, never‑ending chore.
Jiang tried to fight back online. She insists on real photography and at one point rented hotel rooms with better lighting to shoot garments, but returns stayed high. She found that even when she invests in authenticity, the underlying consumer habits and platform economics blunt the benefit. Paying for traffic is an option, but when the marginal sales are likely to be returned, buying clicks is often uneconomic.
Her answer was to test an offline model. The Ningbo shop targets a different buyer: local shoppers who value touch, fit and repeated service. In‑store trial and scenario‑based styling let Jiang identify garments that convert, raise the average ticket through suggested outfits and create stickier customer relationships. The result has been a more predictable flow of revenue and lower churn than the online channel.
This hybrid approach leans on Jiang's supply‑chain relationships. Longstanding ties with factories and stalls let her secure lower minimum order quantities during a downturn, reducing inventory risk. Online channels are still used — Douyin and Xiaohongshu content and live sessions now function primarily as local customer acquisition tools, not as the sole source of volume.
What Jiang's story illustrates is a broader recalibration in Chinese retail: the end of an era when volume-driven, platform-dependent e‑commerce guaranteed growth for low‑price brands. Sellers who survive will be those that understand their customer profiles, sharpen their differentiation and translate digital attention into local, repeatable revenue. For Jiang, stability has supplanted the pursuit of top‑line traffic as the more sustainable objective.