Chengdu's online retail sales exceeded 731 billion yuan, with the city's platform economy gathering momentum to break new ground.
A can of imported baby formula clears customs and leaves the bonded zone within 24 hours; a set of digital content for children reaches 177 countries and regions; a bouquet of fresh flowers is dispatched from an online order to flower shops in more than 3,000 cities and counties nationwide. These everyday consumer transactions originating from Chengdu-based platforms are now reaching the world.
Data from the Chengdu Municipal Bureau of Commerce shows that in 2025, the city's online retail sales reached 731.0 billion yuan, up 10.6% year on year, maintaining its position among the top in the country. Behind this figure lies the city's continuously growing platform economy. In 2026, Chengdu's platform economy has maintained its growth momentum: from January to August, the city's online retail sales rose 7.80% year on year.
At the Shuangliu Park of the Chengdu High-tech Comprehensive Bonded Zone, the self-operated bonded warehouse of Chengdu Youshitong E-Commerce Co., Ltd. is bustling with activity: shelves are neatly stacked with infant formula, diapers, and nutritional supplements from around the world, while workers busily sort, pack, and ship orders without pause. The company's main business, the imported cross-border e-commerce platform Youshitong, recorded sales of nearly 4 billion yuan in 2025, with more than 100,000 SKUs on sale and over 10 million consumers served.
Why choose to start a business in Chengdu? Sun Yue, co-founder of Youshitong, explained that Chengdu possesses the triple conditions of "consumer hinterland + open port + logistics corridor," making it a rare "three-in-one" city for imported cross-border e-commerce. "Chengdu has dual international airports and the Chengdu-Europe Express Railway. The China-Europe freight train has become a mainstream mode of transport for important European sourcing, offering shorter transit times, lower costs, and greater stability."
Enterprises are willing to come, also because the city can accommodate them. In 2025, the Chengdu Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government officially included the platform economy industrial chain among the city's 17 key industrial chains for prioritized advancement; they issued guiding documents such as the "Action Plan for Promoting High-Quality Development of Chengdu's Platform Economy (with E-Commerce as the Focus) Industrial Chain," coordinating efforts to build and strengthen the industrial chain and establishing a spatial layout of "main carrier zones + collaborative development zones."
This capacity to accommodate is further reflected in the resolution of specific problems. When Youshitong faced upgrading needs in bonded warehouse operations and customs clearance efficiency, relevant departments proactively reached out, coordinating with customs, parks, and other parties to optimize regulatory processes, helping the company achieve customs clearance and zone departure for 99% of orders within 24 hours.
Choosing to put down roots in Chengdu, Li Dan, Vice President of Marketing for the "Jiaojiao" reading brand at Chengdu Shusheng Technology Co., Ltd., said the company values the industrial ecosystem. "Chengdu has gathered a large number of education, animation, film and television, and internet enterprises, with significant advantages in industrial collaboration. We integrate education, publishing, animation, and technology to develop children's digital content, and the complete content production chain can be assembled locally."
It is understood that as a growth-oriented digital content platform for children aged 3 to 12, "Jiaojiao" has been deeply engaged in children's education for nearly two decades, with cumulative users exceeding 40 million. In Chengdu, the role of the platform economy extends far beyond online transactions; it is also reflected in the digital transformation of traditional industries.
Chengdu Huawa Network Technology Co., Ltd. is a national platform-type unicorn enterprise incubated and cultivated in Chengdu. Starting from a residential building in 2014, Huawa has connected hundreds of thousands of flower shops across the country into a single network, building a digital order-dispatching platform covering more than 3,000 cities and counties nationwide and linking over 510,000 flower shops. Currently, the platform has more than 500,000 registered users and annual transaction volume of nearly 1 billion yuan. In Chengdu, Huawa's visualized data connects hundreds of thousands of flower shops nationwide into one network. Image provided by Chengdu Municipal Bureau of Commerce.
The platform has also driven employment and enterprise clustering upstream and downstream. For example, Huawa integrates the upstream (growers, consumables/floral material wholesalers), midstream (fresh flower e-commerce/O2O platforms, floral art training institutions, flower shops), and downstream (flower consumers) of the fresh flower industry, establishing a one-stop service platform; "Jiaojiao," meanwhile, drives the coordinated development of local upstream and downstream enterprises in animation production, publishing and printing, voice acting, and technology R&D. Its recently launched first parent-child cultural tourism interactive drama, "Shu Xiu Tian Xia," is an example of such cross-sector collaboration.
As the construction and strengthening of the platform economy industrial chain advances in depth, Chengdu is using "goose-formation" industrial clusters as a driving force to accelerate the building of a core zone for the platform economy industrial chain that is first-class nationally and leading in central and western China. This not only attracts platforms such as JD.com and Douyin to establish regional or functional headquarters, but also enables more local platforms to start from Chengdu, serve the whole country, and go global. As of now, Chengdu has cultivated 7 national vertical-sector leading platforms. A relevant official from the Chengdu Municipal Bureau of Commerce stated that Chengdu aims to build 15 leading local platforms by 2028.
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