Can Hebei Neiroll Network help the Hebei factory?

“

Author | Wuqing

Editor丨Nuts

Cover source丨Unsplash

“

In April 1995, Jack Ma and his friends founded China’s first Internet commercial information publishing website in Hangzhou, named “China Yellow Pages”. This was China’s first commercial website with a .com domain name, and also paved the way for Jack Ma to later found Alibaba.

More than thirty years later, the mobile Internet has already become popular, and the wave of AI innovation is in full swing. Ancient information service platforms such as the “Internet Yellow Pages” seem to no longer belong to this era. But what people didn’t expect was that a B2B industry matching yellow pages nicknamed “Hebei Neijuan.com” became very popular in September this year, and the popularity of breaking the circle has spread from Hebei to the entire e-commerce industry.

According to the website, this yellow page mainly collects in-depth and complete data on industries and factories in Hebei, indicating the main products, location and verification level one by one, allowing buyers to search and compare on their own, and then directly contact the factory to negotiate bulk purchases and long-term cooperation.

Web page information shows that as of September 23, the website has included 497 district and county industries and 14,809 companies, covering 167 districts and counties. The site name was also changed from the previous “Hebei Neijuan Network” to “Hebei Factory Network”.

Different from other B2B websites, the biggest feature of “Hebei Factory Network” is that it focuses on “no matching, no quotation, no guarantee, and no commission.”

In an era when various e-commerce websites, social media, and short video platforms have become ubiquitous, why do Hebei sellers still use the “yellow pages”, an “old” Internet communication method, to find business opportunities? And can this seemingly sincere grouping for warmth really allow both the upstream and downstream of the factory to achieve satisfactory “big results”?

1

Why Hebei

As for the true origin of the e-commerce concept of “Hebei Neijuan.com”, there is currently no accurate statement. Even on the various Hebei Factory Networks and Hebei Neijuan.com, it is difficult to distinguish who is Li Kui and who is Li Gui. However, many media reports have mentioned that the original intention of the establishment of “Hebei Neijuan.com” was for Hebei e-commerce merchants to resist the low-price squeeze of the platform.

Compared with this website, Hebei e-commerce merchants are obviously much more famous in the industry.

From daily necessities to clothing and bags, from hardware accessories to outdoor tables and chairs, Hebei’s e-commerce sellers are all over the province. The reason why they make other peers “frightened” is that they push prices to the extreme. Even e-commerce sellers in Yiwu, Guangzhou and other industrial belts are difficult to compete with Hebei sellers on price.

On the Internet, low-price jokes about sellers in Hebei have long become a hot topic in the e-commerce circle.

When it comes to profits, Hebei sellers only need to be better than farmers; when it comes to costs, Hebei sellers and their employees either give birth to their own children or give birth to their own children. The price of the goods is the selling price. If you wrap an extra layer of tape, you will lose money. You can earn 200 by selling cartons every day…

Putting aside these joking remarks, the reason why Hebei sellers can keep prices down is inseparable from the province’s complete industrial system foundation. According to data released by the Hebei Provincial Bureau of Statistics, in 2024, of all 41 industrial industry categories and 207 industry intermediate categories, Hebei has covered 40 industry categories and 193 industry intermediate categories.

The completion of the industry brings convenience to production. As early as 2023, Hebei Province’s county-level characteristic industrial clusters have formed a development pattern of “counties with clusters”. There are 107 key characteristic industrial clusters in the province, with operating income of 3.86 trillion yuan in 2025.

Among them, some clusters have high market shares across the country and even around the world. For example, Gaoyang County’s towel textile industry accounts for about one-third of the national market share; Qinghe County is the world’s largest cashmere raw material processing and distribution center; Anping County’s woven wire mesh production, sales, and exports account for more than 80% of the country’s total.

In addition, the wire and cable industry in Ningjin County, bio-health in Quzhou County, special auto parts in Wei County, and baby carriages in Pingxiang County are also well-known industrial clusters in their respective fields.

Hebei’s express delivery network, which extends in all directions, has further boosted the accelerated development of e-commerce in the industrial belt. The express delivery business volume of Hebei Province ranks fourth in the country all year round, second only to Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. The huge express delivery volume has also given rise to an express delivery price war. For a period of time, Hebei’s delivery price can directly match that of Yiwu. This also gives Hebei sellers more confidence to “low price and free shipping”.

However, it is precisely because of the path of long-term low prices and high volume that Hebei, a major e-commerce province, has not been able to incubate a number of well-known e-commerce brands like Zhejiang and Guangdong. This also leads to the fact that Hebei sellers will eventually become helpless when faced with the profit squeeze from e-commerce platforms.

2

Can I grab the cake from the platform?

When Hebei e-commerce sellers who broke out of the industry at low prices got together to build their own platform, many people’s first reaction was that this would affect Pinduoduo’s cake. After all, in terms of price, direct supply from manufacturers is always more cost-effective than selling through middlemen such as platforms.

But in fact, whether it is Hebei Neijuan.com or Hebei Factory.com, it is difficult to get a share of the e-commerce platform through direct factory sales.

The reason is not complicated: today’s e-commerce platforms, even low-price malls like Pinduoduo, have a complete sales guarantee system, including logistics, after-sales, payment and other links. The price of goods paid by consumers already includes these hidden costs; and it is almost impossible for factories to match the full set of services provided by e-commerce platforms.

Moreover, Hebei e-commerce generally follows the low-price route, the value of goods is not high, and the profit margins it can provide to consumers are also limited. For example, if a consumer purchases a product worth several thousand yuan, he or she may save a few hundred yuan in price by bypassing the e-commerce platform and purchasing it directly from the manufacturer; but if it is only a small item worth a few yuan or more than a dozen yuan, an e-commerce platform with more convenient after-sales is the first choice for most people.

Whether it is established e-commerce giants such as Taoxi, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, or emerging traffic centers such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu, consumers have developed the habit of using online shopping platforms. In addition, these platforms also launch promotions and issue coupons from time to time, which further enhances consumers’ stickiness.

Businesses in industrial belts team up to build their own platforms. The ones that are really likely to be impacted are wholesale purchasing websites like 1688.

First of all, for factories, although e-commerce retail can generate momentum in a short period of time, the traffic is not in their own hands; although wholesale prices are slightly lower, they are more stable and the payment cycle is shorter. This kind of certainty brings a sense of security that no number of e-commerce platforms combined can provide.

In the past, wholesale purchasing websites had more customer traffic, and factories were willing to pay for advertising. However, as the trend of e-commerce price comparison spreads from the retail side to the procurement side, many factories have been passively involved in the involution. They can only obtain higher rankings on procurement websites at lower prices, and use this to obtain more customers and orders.

But in the long run, this method of relying on price will definitely come at the expense of product quality. Low price creates low quality, and low quality will cause retailers to lose customer trust; when a product is no longer popular in the market, it is the factory itself that ultimately loses orders.

Factories team up to build their own Yellow Pages website. In fact, what they ultimately resist is not the service fees charged by other Internet platforms, but the fact that after paying, they have to endure a set of unreasonable price comparison rules imposed by the platform. This kind of oppression is far more destructive than direct charges.

3

Why do factories stick together?

Allowing factories to directly supply goods to e-commerce platforms is not a new topic. For a period of time, this has become a new channel that many factories are competing to expand.

Alibaba launched the semi-managed operation service “Tao Factory” as early as 2019, focusing on the source factory direct supply (M2C) model, covering all categories of food, clothing and clothing.

JD.com and Pinduoduo have been promoting fully managed and self-operated models in recent years. They mainly invite white-label factories with industrial belts to settle in. The platforms are responsible for operations, marketing, logistics and other aspects, which greatly reduces the operating costs of the factories.

But after the factories and platforms experienced a short honeymoon period of explosive orders, problems began to emerge. When factories find that when choosing a platform, the biggest advantage they look for is still price; as for other values ​​that factories can provide, most of them are ignored.

When factories that only focus on production are drawn into the vortex of endless price comparisons, their ability to resist risks is sometimes not as good as traders. Traders can choose different categories of products to sell, but most factories only have the ability to produce one type of product. Once the profits of such products are compressed to extremely low levels by the market, the entire factory is likely to face disaster.

And as more and more products are sold, the product price data mastered by the platform becomes more and more accurate, and a “choking price” can be directly given to the manufacturer: if the factory does not make it, there will be no order quantity; if it does, there will be no profit.

When the factory loses its bargaining power and even the bottom price is no longer a secret, the factory bosses, who are belatedly aware of the situation, naturally want to break away from the platform and stick together for warmth.

Hebei merchants are unwilling to engage in meaningless involution, and the local government is also working hard to promote industrial transformation. In particular, regions like Hebei, which have a solid industrial system foundation and convenient transportation, have more opportunities to continuously upgrade and develop in the form of industrial clusters.

In February this year, Hebei Province announced that it would carry out 2026 actions to combat “involution”, improve quality, and promote competition to comprehensively rectify irrational competition problems in county-level characteristic industrial clusters. We will carry out special operations to crack down on inferior quality and low prices, resolutely investigate and deal with illegal acts of counterfeiting, and promote the transformation of competition from “price competition” to “quality competition”.

Specific measures include carrying out anti-monopoly “enforcement and enterprise protection” actions, resolutely correcting behaviors that use advantageous positions to squeeze the development space of other business entities; in-depth rectification of illegal charges by enterprises in government departments and subordinate units, industry associations and chambers of commerce, etc., standardizing unreasonable charging behaviors, and reducing institutional transaction costs of business entities, etc.