On Wildberries the buyer does not collect every order. They open the parcel at the pickup point and may refuse it — by which time the goods have already been bought by you, packed and carried across the border. That money is spent whatever the fitting ends in.
The arithmetic of the buyout share
If half the orders are collected, one sale takes two shipments. If a third, three. Logistics, packaging and delivery to the Chinese warehouse are paid on every one, while revenue arrives from only one. The buyout share therefore enters your cost as a multiplier, and a drop from 50 to 35 per cent hurts more than five points added to the commission.
Three roads for an unclaimed item
- Shipping back to China. The goods come back whole, but the return leg is paid at the same rates as the outbound one. For a light parcel that is cheap; for a heavy one it is dear.
- Disposal. No return leg, but the entire cost of the goods is lost.
- Taking it in and selling it in Russia. The item stays in the country and is sold there, and its value comes back to you — either at the Chinese market price or as half of your price on the platform.
What the platform takes
For handing a return over in Russia, Wildberries charges a flat fee: 250 ₽ for a standard item, 170 ₽ for an oversized one and 1,050 ₽ for a bulky one. In yuan at the Central Bank rate that is roughly 19.4, 13.2 and 81.5 ¥. The amount is flat, and that is the catch: on an 8 ¥ item, handling the return costs more than the item; on a 300 ¥ item it is barely noticeable.
Hence a simple rule: it is worth recovering only what costs more than the handling. The threshold is about 250 ₽ per unit. Below it, disposal is cheaper, and there is nothing shameful in that: it is arithmetic, not carelessness.
Why look this up on our site
The return tariffs also live only inside the account, and only in roubles. We pull them over the API every day and convert them to yuan at the official Central Bank rate — rounded up to the kopeck, so the cost is never understated. The rate and the date it was taken are printed right next to the figures. Warehouses in other countries and those that accept nothing are stripped from the table: the platform’s raw response has twenty-three rows, and two of them are useful.