Courier service revenue in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region reached 6.53 billion yuan (about 980 million U.S. dollars) in the first nine months of 2026, up 11.4 percent year on year, as free shipping lowered the cost of online shopping and unleashed consumer demand across the region.
Thanks to China’s rapidly expanding high-speed logistics network, residents of Xinjiang, a vast, sparsely populated border region with difficult terrain, now have access to fast, affordable courier services, a marked improvement from just a few years ago.
In the region's capital Urumqi, a 500-mu (about 33 hectares) smart logistics park operated by JINGDONG Logistics, the logistics arm of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, runs the region's first Zhilang Goods-to-Person (GTP) System around the clock. Warehouse robots shuttle back and forth, handling up to 1 million parcels a day at peak as shipments arrive from across the country to be sorted and dispatched to cities and prefectures throughout Xinjiang.
In Kashgar, the city's first large digital integrated logistics hub has been stocked in advance with more than 600,000 small items and over 50,000 large items shipped in from other parts of China, ready for rapid delivery when orders arrive.
Previously, orders took seven to eight days to reach residents in southern Xinjiang, usually traveling thousands of kilometers from China's southeastern coastal provinces. Now, goods are dispatched from the local warehouse and delivered within one to two days, with free shipping covering all orders handled through the facility.
In the run-up to this year’s Double 11 shopping festival, the Kashgar warehouse has seen a sharp rise in daily volume, handling 45,000 orders a day.
"We use big data analysis to identify which goods are ordered most frequently, and we stock them in advance. If local users place orders before 11:00, we deliver in the afternoon; if they order before 23:00, we deliver the next morning," said Li Xuefeng, director of the Kashgar-Hotan area of JD Logistics.
Xinjiang sees surge in parcel deliveries after joining nationwide free delivery zones
