Chinese New Year and 11.11: When Shipping From China Slows Down

When is Chinese New Year and how long do sellers close?

Chinese New Year, also called Spring Festival, follows the lunar calendar and lands on a different date each year, somewhere between late January and the third week of February. The official public holiday is about a week, but the real closure is longer. Factory workers travel home across the country, so production stops a week or two before the holiday and restarts a week or two after it, sometimes later while staff return. Online sellers on Taobao and 1688 often stop dispatching in the week before and resume a week or more after. Domestic couriers run reduced services. Taken together, expect roughly two to four weeks in which little moves. The exact dates change every year, so check the current year's calendar before you plan.

What happens to an order placed just before Chinese New Year?

If the seller still has staff, the item may dispatch before the holiday and reach the forwarder's warehouse in time for a pre-holiday flight. More often, the listing shows a notice that orders placed after a certain date will ship after the holiday. Payment is taken, the order sits, and dispatch happens when the seller reopens. If the item is made to order, production restarts after the holiday too, adding more days. Freight forwarders also pause consolidation during the holiday, so a parcel that reaches the warehouse on the last day may wait for the first post-holiday flight. In a bad case an order placed in the last week of January arrives in Pakistan in early March.

What is 11.11 and why does it slow shipping?

11.11, or Singles Day, is the largest online shopping event in China, run on 11 November each year across Taobao, Tmall, 1688 and AliExpress. Sellers process a very large share of their yearly orders in a few days. Warehouses run behind, domestic couriers are saturated, and the airlines' cargo space fills with e-commerce parcels. Dispatch that would normally take one or two days can take a week. The congestion typically lasts one to three weeks after the event. Prices are often lower during the sale, which is why some buyers accept the delay. If you need the item by a date, the sale saving may not be worth it.

What about 618 and other holidays?

618 is the mid-year sale around 18 June across the main Chinese platforms. It is smaller than 11.11 but produces the same pattern: a burst of orders followed by one to two weeks of slower dispatch and fuller flights. The National Day holiday in the first week of October, often called Golden Week, closes many sellers for several days and causes a milder slowdown. None of these compares to Chinese New Year, which is the only period when the whole supply chain stops rather than slows.

Calendar of slow periods

How should I time a single order?

• Before Chinese New Year: pay at least three weeks before the holiday date so the seller dispatches and the parcel flies before closures. If you cannot, wait until the second half of February.
• Around 11.11: if you want the sale price, order on the day and accept a longer wait. If you need the item by a date, order in late October or wait until the first week of December.
• Around 618: order in early June or wait until July.
• Any time: prefer in-stock listings over pre-order ones, since made-to-order items suffer most from closures.

Our day-by-day import timeline shows which stages stretch in these periods, and how to track a parcel from China explains why tracking goes quiet while parcels wait.

Do prices change in these periods?

Item prices on the platforms fall during 11.11 and 618 and are normal at Chinese New Year. Freight is the opposite: air cargo rates rise when space is tight after the big sales and before the holiday, and some forwarders add peak surcharges. Rupee quotes also depend on the exchange rate on the day. If you are given a delivered price in rupees during a peak period, it reflects those freight conditions and is valid for a limited window. See shipping cost and time from China to Pakistan for the normal baseline.

What we do in these periods

When you send us a link in a slow period, we tell you plainly if the seller has posted a holiday notice or if dispatch is likely to be delayed, and the price we give you still covers everything in one rupee amount paid once before the item ships. The 7 to 15 day door to door estimate counts from the seller's dispatch, so in these weeks the honest answer is that dispatch itself may take longer than usual, and we say so before you pay.