---
title: "Looking at PDD's empowerment practices in rural areas from the perspective of garlic leaving the village, \"free delivery into the village\" stirs the economic vitality"
type: "News"
locale: "en"
url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/296101805.md"
description: "PDD is piloting a \"free delivery to villages\" service in Qixian, Henan Province, breaking the logistics empty return dilemma by bringing express delivery into villages and taking agricultural products out of villages, significantly reducing the cost of transporting agricultural products out of villages. This move reconstructs the rural business logic, helps garlic farmers break free from the price suppression of intermediaries, achieve increased income, and shifts rural areas from passive waiting to actively connecting with the market"
datetime: "2026-08-17T12:02:02.000Z"
locales:
  - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/296101805.md)
  - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/296101805.md)
  - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/296101805.md)
---

# Looking at PDD's empowerment practices in rural areas from the perspective of garlic leaving the village, "free delivery into the village" stirs the economic vitality

In the thousands of years of history of Chinese villages, the transportation of agricultural products from the field to the table has never been as convenient as it is today. In the past, farmers had to either wait for merchants to come to their door or take their goods to the market, often enduring price cuts from layers of middlemen in either case... A bumper harvest did not necessarily mean increased income, which has been a dilemma for centuries. However, Pinduoduo (PDD.US) is changing all of this by trialing "free delivery to villages." As delivery trucks bring packages into villages every day and take agricultural products out on their return trips, rural areas have become an indispensable part of commercial flow.

In the nationally renowned "hometown of garlic" in Qixian, Henan, 70-year-old garlic farmer Zhang Zhenfeng has changed the way he sells garlic this year. He no longer needs to take garlic to the county market to be priced down, nor does he passively wait for village vendors to come to him. Zhang Jinjian, a post-90s e-commerce seller from the same village, proactively comes to buy, offering five to six hundred yuan more per mu than the market price. Behind this transaction is a systematic reconstruction of rural logistics efficiency. By the end of 2025, Pinduoduo will pilot the "free delivery to villages" service in Qixian, breaking the industry dilemma of "empty trucks returning from villages" and significantly reducing the logistics costs of agricultural products leaving the village. When the delivery truck's route merges with the outflow of agricultural products, the underlying logic of rural commerce is being rewritten.

## **How does Pinduoduo make the "two-way journey" of entering and exiting villages possible?**

Zhang Jinjian's connection with e-commerce began in 2017. At that time, he opened his first store on Pinduoduo, initially receiving only a few orders a day, which gradually increased to one or two hundred. The turning point came during a platform event when, due to the good quality of garlic, his store received twenty thousand orders overnight. "At that time, I had no experience at all," Zhang Jinjian recalled that the packing boxes he prepared were simply not enough, so he contacted manufacturers overnight to arrange shipments and called on dozens of villagers to help, taking three days to complete the shipment of twenty thousand orders.

Those three days made him realize that as order volume increased, shipping efficiency and fulfillment time must keep pace. His solution was to prepare a delivery vehicle, organize workers to load the packed garlic daily, and arrange for drivers to take it to the county's delivery point. The short-distance transport of just over ten kilometers incurred monthly labor and fuel costs exceeding 3,000 yuan, totaling nearly 40,000 yuan a year. He attempted to negotiate with several courier companies to collect packages in the village, but none were willing to budge—entering the village meant traveling empty, and the costs could not be covered. At that time, the shipping cost for a five-kilogram package of garlic sent from the county point to the rest of the country was about 7 yuan. If the additional costs of collecting packages in the village were factored in, it would be cheaper to deliver them himself.

A turning point appeared at the end of 2025. Pinduoduo piloted the "free delivery to villages" service in Qixian, with delivery trucks bringing packages into the village daily and collecting packages from villagers on their return trips. Zhang Jinjian and the village delivery staff hit it off: during the day, they would collect garlic, sort, pack, and label it, and in the afternoon, the delivery truck would unload packages ordered by villagers before directly heading to the warehouse to load the packages that needed to be sent out that day. The issue of returning empty was resolved, and garlic no longer needed to be repeatedly loaded and unloaded, alleviating the anxiety of timing.

![截屏 2026-08-17 19.58.16.png](https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://img.zhitongcaijing.com/image/20260817/1786967906679608.png?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg) The person in charge of the "free delivery to villages" transit warehouse in Qixian, Duan Yuanhang, feels deeply about this: "In the past, orders in the village were scattered, the road conditions were complex, and the cost of single-item delivery was high, leading to a general lack of motivation for express delivery companies to penetrate rural areas. Now, Pinduoduo has taken on the second-stage transit fee, and everyone's enthusiasm is noticeably different."

Zhang Jinjian calculated an account: Previously, when garlic was shipped out of the village, he spent over 3,000 yuan each month to send it to the county town's distribution point, and then it was sent nationwide from there, with a shipping cost of 7 yuan for a five-kilogram package; now, the same weight is shipped directly from the village entrance to the whole country, and the shipping cost has dropped to around 3 yuan. "With logistics costs coming down, the profit margin has increased significantly." For him, this change represents an efficiency leap from "delivering goods himself" to "loading at the village entrance"; for the entire garlic industry in Qixian, it signifies a supply chain reshaping from "difficulty in getting agricultural products into the city" to "loading right out of the village."

## **With logistics flowing, economic "fresh water" comes in**

The changes in Zhang Jinjian's business quickly transmitted to every person in the village.

In the past, farmers were most worried about sales channels for garlic. This year, Zhang Jinjian purchased a large amount of garlic from the village at a price slightly higher than the market acquisition price, allowing garlic farmers like Zhang Zhenfeng to sell an additional 500 to 600 yuan per mu. In Zhang Jinjian's warehouse, many villagers who supply him also come here to help with packaging, paid by the piece, earning about 120 to 130 yuan a day, which amounts to around 4,000 yuan a month. His online store has also hired five or six influencers, each streaming for two to three hours, with a fixed salary of 3,600 to 4,000 yuan. As express delivery trucks pass through the rural roads daily, garlic fields and garlic farmers appear in the live broadcasts, completing the entire chain from planting garlic, harvesting, packaging to shipping right in the village, which also means profits stay in the village.

Duan Yuanhang provided another set of data: Currently, the transit warehouse in Qixian processes 10,000 to 12,000 incoming express deliveries daily, with about 2,000 outgoing express deliveries, of which 1,800 are agricultural products, the vast majority being local garlic. The numerical gap between incoming and outgoing deliveries precisely indicates that there is still huge potential for "upward circulation" in rural areas—while the process of filling this gap is itself creating incremental growth.

In Caotun, Qixian, in the past, villagers had to go to a town five kilometers away to pick up express deliveries, making a round trip of ten kilometers, taking nearly an hour. After the village point was established, villagers can now pick up express deliveries right at the village entrance. Xu Lingling's supermarket has been open for 16 years and became a village-level station for "free delivery to villages" at the end of last year. "Now, we receive 100 to 200 packages daily, and people picking up express deliveries also conveniently buy a bottle of water or a pack of cigarettes, significantly increasing foot traffic in the supermarket."

However, this logistics transformation did not start smoothly. Duan Yuanhang recalls that during their first entry into the village, villagers were very wary, with many recording videos on their phones. "Later, we unified work uniforms, promotional posters, and vehicle markings, increased publicity efforts, and allowed villagers to see the convenience firsthand. Their concerns were gradually alleviated." Now, more and more young people are trying to open stores on Pinduoduo to sell their hometown's good garlic nationwide. "In the past, we couldn't even get started; just the shipping part was a bottleneck," Zhang Jinjian said. "Without stable logistics channels and suitable express delivery prices, small sellers simply cannot thrive." When delivery trucks no longer return empty, rural areas will no longer just be the endpoint of consumption, but rather the starting point of the supply chain. When small entrepreneurs like Zhang Jinjian no longer worry about logistics costs, when garlic farmers like Zhang Zhenfeng no longer feel anxious about sales channels, and when village-level stations like Xu Lingling's revive supermarket business through express delivery collection—a sustainable network of rural commercial capillaries is taking shape. It proves one thing: where logistics reach, economic vitality will naturally find a way to grow. Zhitong Finance believes that PDD's investment in infrastructure has led to a leap from "passively waiting" to "actively connecting" in rural areas, marking an unprecedented positional reversal for Chinese villages

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