During the recent 11.11 shopping festival, Liang Zhen, a returning entrepreneur in Langping Township, Bobai County, Yulin, Guangxi, was run off her feet. By day, she drove her orange minivan from village to village to buy chenpi (dried tangerine peel) processed by local residents, and enlisted several villagers to help pack goods in preparation for evening livestream orders. As store orders steadily increased, chenpi was shipped from the mountain village to destinations across the country, and packaging materials needed constant replenishment.

At 4 p.m., a courier truck arrived on schedule at the small shop at the village entrance. Liang Zhen smoothly picked up the cardboard boxes she had ordered on PDD Holdings Inc (PDD), handed the day's packed chenpi and shipping lists to the driver, and asked him to take them back to the county town for dispatch. This batch of chenpi could be sent nationwide the same day.

In this back-and-forth, an e-commerce mega-sale took concrete shape in the mountain village: some people were busy stocking goods, some waited to receive parcels, and others boxed up local specialties to send to distant places. For Liang Zhen, 11.11 was not only a peak sales season but also a test of receiving, packaging, and shipping efficiency.

Chenpi orders flowing from a mountain village livestream

Liang Zhen's village is located in Langping Township, Bobai County, surrounded by mountains on all sides and 22 kilometers one way from the township center. Local hillsides are covered with tea-branch mandarin trees, and villagers mainly make a living by processing chenpi. In the past, most chenpi in the village waited for buyers to come to their doors, and old-tree chenpi and ordinary peel fetched the same purchase price, so good goods could not command a good price.

Four years ago, Liang Zhen returned from Hainan and noticed that local chenpi sales methods had room for improvement. In October 2025, she made up her mind to start e-commerce livestreaming, selling chenpi by grade so that higher-quality old-tree chenpi could fetch a more appropriate price. As orders continued to grow, the order peak of that year's Double 11 soon arrived. Packaging materials such as sealed bags, label paper, and cardboard boxes needed constant replenishment, and packed chenpi also had to be shipped out promptly. In the past, Liang Zhen had to drive specially to the township to collect online purchases, then haul the chenpi to the county town to send parcels. A round trip meant dozens of kilometers of mountain roads, squeezing out a great deal of time for collecting fruit and sun-drying peel. Logistics difficulties once trapped her e-commerce business.

The turning point came at the end of 2025. A small shop next to the village committee opened a Pinduoduo village-level station, and parcels from the county transit warehouse were delivered directly to the village by dedicated vehicles. Packaging materials Liang Zhen bought online, daily necessities like firewood, rice, oil, and salt, and fresh goods from Duoduo Maicai were all delivered to the village entrance. More reassuring still, packed chenpi no longer required a separate trip to the county town; the truck delivering goods into the village could carry shipments along the way and send them nationwide.

As logistics became smoother, Liang Zhen devoted more time to village purchasing, sun-drying and processing, and sales. "Before, it was a few orders a day; now it's dozens. This year's Double 11 order volume is twice that of the same period last year," Liang Zhen told reporters. So far this year, her online chenpi sales have exceeded 700,000 yuan, and she has also helped more than a dozen fruit-growing households in the village open online sales channels.

The small delivery compartment entering the village connects industrial goods going to the countryside on one end and mountain products leaving the mountains on the other. Receiving goods depends on it, and sending parcels depends on it, thus opening up the "last mile" of mountain village e-commerce.

Wheels shuttle through the countryside, one truck of parcels carries two-way nostalgia

The chenpi packed by Liang Zhen ultimately had to ride Wang Wenqiang's truck to leave the village for the county town. Every morning at 8 a.m., Wang Wenqiang arrives on time at the Bobai County logistics transit warehouse to count goods and check lists, departs punctually at 10 a.m., and begins a day of rural delivery work. The delivery route he is responsible for links 17 administrative villages in two townships, Dungu Town and Yong'an Town, covering many villages and a wide service area, with an average daily delivery volume of up to 1,500 parcels. This route passes through the main production area of Bobai olives.

Every autumn, olives hang heavy on the branches in the mountains. Local villagers pick fresh black olives, wash them, rub them repeatedly with fine salt, and dry them naturally to make the uniquely flavored olive角. Jars of olive角 sealed in glass bottles are the most authentic local taste on the dining table, and even more so the hometown flavor that wanderers away from home long for. One day, when Wang Wenqiang was preparing to head to the next point, an elderly person placed a jar of pickled olive角 in his hands, carefully wrote down the address of his son working in Guangdong, and asked him to help send it out.

This jar of olive角 held a story. The elderly person told Wang Wenqiang that in the past, to send a jar of olive角 to his son, he had to ride more than 20 kilometers of mountain roads, and once fell off his bike twice along the way. His son felt sorry for the old man's hardship and repeatedly urged him not to send local specialties anymore. Now, traveling among the villages every day, Wang Wenqiang has long become as close to the villagers as a neighbor. Every time he unloads goods at a station, he takes the initiative to ask everyone about their shipping needs and carries villagers' returns and local specialties back to the transit warehouse along the way. Transfer from village points to the county town incurs no extra charge, and express shipping fees are strictly charged according to platform standards. The transparent and affordable prices greatly reduce villagers' shipping costs.

"When I see villagers waiting at the station entrance from afar to pick up or send parcels, my heart is full of a sense of mission," Wang Wenqiang said. The compartment carries two-way concerns: downward parcels are appliances, medicines, and cotton clothes sent home by children; upward parcels are chenpi, olive角, and dried bamboo shoots sent by villagers. He is like a rural postman of the new era, with wheels rolling over country roads, letting nostalgia cross mountains and seas and letting mountain goods leave the mountains.

Fine-tuned scheduling ensures same-day delivery despite wind and rain

Smooth rural logistics would not be possible without refined capacity scheduling at the transit warehouse. At the Pinduoduo free village delivery transit warehouse in Bobai County, parcels from multiple express companies such as ZTO, STO, and SF Express are gathered together, uniformly sorted, then diverted according to township and village-level stations, and sent to each village by dedicated vehicles. Every morning, sorting staff arrive at 8 a.m., vehicles begin departing one after another at 9 a.m., and the previous day's express items must be out of the warehouse by 11 a.m. and all delivered to village stations by 6 p.m. Even Shapi Town, more than 120 kilometers from the transit warehouse, receives express items on time.

At present, Bobai County has 18 delivery trucks and 18 dedicated routes, covering 257 village-level receiving points. Even if there is only one parcel, vehicles still enter the village to deliver as usual. Behind this efficient delivery network is dispatcher Li Guangyan's scientific scheduling. It is understood that the transit warehouse handles about 20,000 parcels in and out per day on average. Li Guangyan introduced that routes do not use a fixed template but adopt dynamic scheduling: staff comprehensively plan routes based on the total daily express volume, cargo volume in each village, and distance, balancing the workload of each route and avoiding empty runs that waste capacity. Under normal weather, all vehicles complete delivery before 6 p.m. Drivers who leave early can return as early as 3 or 4 p.m. A single driver completes loading, village-by-village unloading, parcel handover, and vehicle charging in a closed loop, with daily working hours stable at 8 hours. In extreme weather such as heavy rain and flooding, stations insist on prioritizing safety without reducing service. When roads are flooded, drivers take shelter nearby and continue only after the rain weakens and road conditions are safe. Since the transit warehouse began operating in December last year, there has never been a case of same-day suspension of express delivery; even if heavy rain causes delays, all parcels are guaranteed to be delivered the next day.

To ensure stable capacity, the station has backup mobile drivers who can fill in at any time when someone takes temporary leave; at the same time, every driver has monthly rest days, preventing fatigued driving and ensuring stable team operations.

11.11 in the mountain village is not only about buying things

From Liang Zhen's chenpi livestream to Wang Wenqiang's truck traveling back and forth between villages, and then to the transit warehouse managed by Li Guangyan, the way 11.11 unfolds in Bobai's mountain villages is not complicated, yet it touches multiple links in operations, consumption, and logistics. Wang Zhen is the person in charge of the Pinduoduo free village delivery transit warehouse in Bobai and has worked in the express delivery industry for more than 20 years. He said that for franchised express outlets wanting to enter villages, the biggest fear is high costs and scattered parcel volumes, making it hard to sustain. Pinduoduo's subsidies essentially cover that most loss-making stretch for them. Now in Bobai County, express parcels from multiple platforms converge at the county transit warehouse, are uniformly gathered, centrally sorted, and delivered to villages via dedicated routes. After villagers place orders on Pinduoduo, different orders do not require separate trips to outlets; all are delivered to village stations. These village points have a low threshold, and the vast majority of station operators are left-behind elderly people in the villages, who can complete inbound and outbound registration using only a mobile phone.

After more than a year of stable operation, the project's upward shipping volume has also been slowly growing. In addition to e-commerce returns, more and more villagers hand local specialties to village-bound trucks to send out. The small shops in the mountain villages are the "intelligence stations" where villagers gather to chat. But beyond news, there are now parcels large and small. Elderly people come to pick up cotton shoes sent by children far away; entrepreneurs send out chenpi here; mountain goods travel outward along the mountain roads, while appliances and daily necessities travel inward along the same roads. Free village delivery is not just about bringing parcels to the doorstep. It builds a two-way channel in the mountains: the consumption dividend from outside falls into the countryside, and the produce from the mountains finds a broader market. This 11.11, the 257 village-level stations hidden in the Bobai mountains quietly witness how business and daily life in the mountain villages are little by little changed by logistics. (Text, images, and data source: Pinduoduo) Advertisement