Bumper Lychee Harvest, So Why Are Online Prices Still High?
I. Branches laden with lychees
My hometown is Lufeng City in Guangdong Province, where our family tends a lychee grove covering nearly an acre. Ever since I can remember, they have been growing lychees there. The youngest tree was planted the year I was born and is now thirty-one years old.
In past years when the harvest was plentiful, my parents would send some to the four of us siblings, give a little to relatives, and that would pretty much be all. Last year was a lean season; the trees bore very little fruit, just enough for our own household. The two crates they usually sent me were reduced to a small box. This year has been a bumper harvest, in fact one of the best in decades. With the trees yielding abundantly, my husband, Antian, and I decided to head back home for a few days to work as fruit growers.
An Tian and I returned to our family orchard in late June. Although we were braced for it, it wasn’t until we stepped onto the ground that we truly felt the weight of the bountiful harvest. Branches bowed under the strain, and even the small offshoots sprouting from the main trunks were heavy with fruit. The lychees hanging highest had turned a brilliant red, while those in the shade still held a touch of green.
Our trees are left to grow naturally without chemical fertilisers, so the fruit tends to be smaller than conventionally grown lychees and doesn’t fetch a high price at local markets. When the season first opened, local stalls were pricing lychees at around 10 yuan per jin (500g). To clear stock quickly, my mother listed hers at 8 yuan. Once the market flooded with the full harvest, we could barely move any at 5.5 yuan a jin. For buyers, large size and low price are what matter; they seldom care whether chemicals were sprayed.
On top of that, our locality lacks centralised purchasing hubs like those in Maoming, making it nearly impossible to hand over small volumes to wholesalers. To get a better return, we had to turn to online sales.
Fortunately, when we relocated to Longyan in Fujian to start our own farm last October, we set up a WeChat Mini Store to sell our produce and gradually built a WeChat group where we shared snippets of our daily lives. So, two days before heading back, I dropped a casual mention of selling lychees in the group. Almost immediately, three or four friends placed orders, ensuring we could spend our first day entirely on packing and dispatch.
An Tian photographed the lychees on-site for the Mini Store’s product listings, and we kept promoting them on WeChat Moments and in the group chat. Unsure of how many people would actually buy, we reasoned that every sale counted. We therefore didn’t price them at a premium for ecological farming, instead setting the rate at 54 yuan for three jin and 88 yuan for five.
We based our pricing on supermarket rates in Fuzhou, roughly 16 yuan per jin, since we had both worked there before heading back to the countryside and assumed city friends would be more inclined to purchase. Yet we badly underestimated shipping costs and overlooked the difference between intra-provincial and cross-provincial rates. That miscalculation is exactly what caused such a headache during our first dispatch.
II. Shipping costs more than the lychees
Lacking experience for our first shipment, it was rather a scramble. We had no cardboard boxes, no foam containers, only trees laden with lychees. Lychees are also notoriously difficult to keep fresh. If picked and left untreated, at the day’s temperature their skin will turn black and dry out by the next day. Customers might assume they have gone off and complain or send them back. So we decided on the spot to take them straight to a SF Express service point for packing; they would definitely have everything we needed sorted.
Conghua in Guangzhou, home to the farm where we once completed our internship, is one of China’s principal litchi-growing regions. During the harvest season, SF Express operates dedicated collection points for litchis there, keeping courier fees relatively low. Yet our village is made up of smallholders and independent growers, and we have only one standard SF Express outlet. By the time we arrived, a queue had already formed, yet there was only a single staff member on duty. He was far too pressed to answer any questions, and the scene soon descended into disarray.
As I was asking about polystyrene boxes, a woman at the shop next door piped up: “We sell them here too. How many jin are you packing?” With so many local farmers coming to dispatch their fruit these past few days, her polystyrene boxes and ice packs have been flying off the shelves.
Once packed and ready for dispatch, the courier handed us shipping labels to enter the details online, so he could keep processing the other parcels. Antian took charge of scanning the QR code to place the order, and he remarked with a touch of astonishment, “Thirty-six yuan to Fuzhou?!”
“We’re selling them for fifty-four yuan, and shipping is thirty-six. And that’s still for the standard express rate.” Antian muttered the figures to himself, running through the sums. The packing had been frantic, the surroundings chaotic, and my mind was just as scattered. He had mistakenly assumed our five-jin parcels were three-jin ones.
My head was buzzing amidst the crowd, with my mother waiting nearby. She couldn’t understand why we were taking so long to place the order, as she doesn’t speak Mandarin. Though my thoughts were in a jumble, I couldn’t see any other way forward. Even if it meant we’d make no profit at all, we had no choice but to send them out.
On the way back, my head cleared up a bit, and it finally clicked that we were actually shipping the 2.5kg packs. With a selling price of ¥88, delivery to Fujian at ¥36, and ice packs and box costing ¥5, that leaves us with just ¥47. Ship it further, and the postage gets even steeper; to Shandong, standard express for a 2.5kg pack runs to ¥54. Put simply, courier and packaging costs account for roughly two-thirds of the revenue from each lychee order.
By then, we had already received over a dozen orders on Weidian, destined for Sichuan, Shandong, and Fujian. At a loss over how to handle the shipping costs, we split our product listings into two price tiers that evening: one for delivery within our province and another for elsewhere. The in-province rates stayed at 54 yuan for 3 jin and 88 yuan for 5 jin, while out-of-province prices were increased to 68 yuan for 3 jin and 108 yuan for 5 jin.
Many customers fail to see why the fruit carries such a high price tag this year despite an obvious bumper harvest, but crunch the numbers from a grower’s perspective, and the shipping costs make the dilemma instantly clear.
Later, we switched to JD Logistics. While the base rates matched those of SF Express, the availability of discount vouchers made it slightly more economical overall. We eventually did the sums: out of 51 orders sold, we generated 4,503 yuan in revenue, against 1,526 yuan spent on shipping and packaging. Courier and packaging costs ultimately consumed roughly a third of our total income. Crucially, this figure doesn’t even account for the labour costs incurred for harvesting, sorting, and packing to meet the parcel deadlines.
III. Fruit Farmers Racing Against Time
This is precisely what worries me most about shipping by courier. Watching the trees heavy with fruit, Antian was keen to sell as much as possible as quickly as possible. But for me, the volume sold isn’t the most important thing. I’m far more concerned that customers might receive rotten lychees. The lychees I’ve eaten all my life are delicious, and I never want them to arrive in someone else’s hands as spoiled fruit. I want them to taste the same wonderful flavour that I know so well.
To keep lychees fresh, we farmers must race against the clock during harvesting and packing. The fruit should be picked when the weather is cooler, as lower temperatures help preserve freshness. This means heading out to the orchard early every morning. The lychees must also be completely dry when picked; any moisture left on them will quickly turn them to mush once sealed inside a foam box. I remember one evening when a heavy downpour started. The sound of rain lashing down in the middle of the night filled me with dread. When I arrived at the orchard at six in the morning, the lychees were still soaked. All our plans were thrown into disarray, and we had to wait until the sun came out and the fruit had dried in the air before we could begin picking.
Packing after harvest is a real test of dexterity and speed. Antian and I can pack an average of twenty boxes a day between us. We head out at seven in the morning and return by ten. Back at the packing area, we start sorting. Any lychees with insect holes or poor cosmetic appearance are set aside. We trim back some of the stems and leaves, but leave a little on, as this helps maintain freshness. By midday, we’ve usually sorted through most of the haul. After lunch, we carry on, carefully inspecting each lychee before it goes into a box, which naturally takes more time. Once packed by three in the afternoon, the boxes are taken to the main courier depot so the lychees can catch the earliest dispatch run of the day.
Those few days passed in a blur. After we returned to Longyan in Fujian, several more rainstorms hit Guangdong. I imagine that in every lychee grove across this land, there are farmers just like us weaving through the green and red fruit, doing everything they can to harvest before time runs out. I found myself thinking again of my mother’s anxious expression as she waited by the side while we dispatched the first shipment. Freight costs are indeed steep, but there’s nothing we can do about that. All we can do is race against time to keep the lychees fresh before they leave our hands. As small-scale growers, this is all we can do.
Photography: Unless otherwise noted, all photos taken by the author
Editor: Yuyang