It’s the end of that particular record, not of your parcel. Domestic Chinese tracking covers the journey from the seller to the address you gave — which, when you shop through a forwarding agent, is their warehouse rather than your home. Once it arrives there, the Chinese leg has done its job and the number stops updating, correctly. What happens next sits with your forwarder: they receive it, log it against your account, and hold it until you ask for it to be shipped on, often consolidated with other purchases. The next tracking record begins when they create the international shipment, under a completely new number.

Use the number the seller gives you on the Chinese platform, which covers pickup through to delivery at your forwarder’s door. Add it here and you’ll see the same entries without needing to read them on a Chinese-language site or work out which of the Tongda carriers has it. This leg is usually quick and well-scanned, since domestic Chinese delivery is among the fastest anywhere. The entry worth waiting for is the delivery confirmation at the warehouse address — that’s your cue to check your forwarder’s account, because their system won’t always register the arrival on the same day the carrier records it.

Name each one as you add it, which turns an indistinguishable column of numbers into “winter coat”, “phone case”, “gift for mum”. Orders heading to a single forwarder address are unusually easy to confuse, since they share a destination and often arrive within days of each other. Your forwarder’s dashboard will also list arrivals by parcel, though matching those to your original orders is exactly the step that gets fiddly. Connecting your Gmail after signing in with Google helps here too, since confirmations get matched automatically rather than leaving you to reconcile them by hand later.

Fast, by most countries’ standards — often one to three days between major cities, and same-day or next-day within a single city. Remote provinces add time, though less than you might expect given the distances. The practical consequence for forwarding customers is that the Chinese leg is rarely the slow part: if your order is taking weeks, the delay almost always sits with the seller dispatching, your forwarder consolidating, or the international shipment, rather than with domestic delivery. Sale periods like the November and June events stretch everything, and Chinese New Year pauses the whole system for a couple of weeks.

Usually your forwarder, because they’re holding the physical parcel. Warehouse staff log arrivals as they unpack them, which can run ahead of a carrier’s final delivery entry, and occasionally a delivery scan is missed altogether at a high-volume address receiving hundreds of parcels daily. The reverse also happens: a carrier records delivery to the building while the parcel waits to be sorted to your account inside, which can take a day. Trust whichever source has the parcel in hand. If your forwarder confirms receipt, treat it as arrived regardless of what the public record says, and ask them for a photo if you want certainty.

Yes to both. Your forwarder creates a fresh international shipment when they send your consolidated parcel, and that comes with its own number from whichever carrier they use — entirely unconnected to the Chinese one. Most people lose the thread at exactly this point, since the first number has long since frozen. Add the new one here alongside the old, and the two join into a single continuous record running from the Taobao seller's door to yours. It's worth adding the moment your forwarder issues it rather than later, because the first international entries often appear within hours.

Stitching those legs together is the job this page does. A forwarded order produces at least two entirely separate records, sometimes three when the destination country’s carrier issues its own, and no single carrier’s site will ever show you more than its own slice. Add each number as it appears and we stitch them in order, so the whole journey reads as one. Turn alerts on and you’ll hear when each leg begins, which for forwarding customers is genuinely useful — the gap between a parcel reaching the warehouse and leaving it again is entirely in your control, and easy to forget about.

You may also want to explore tracking for these other destinations:

• Check on your China delivery

• Your United States orders, all in one place

• Waiting on something from Great Britain?

• Keep an eye on Australia deliveries

• Tracking made easy for Singapore

• See deliveries to and from Germany

These carrier pages are worth a look too:

• Waiting on China Post? Track it here

• Track your China EMS parcels

• Following a Yun Express delivery?

• 4PX tracking, step by step

• See where your CNE Express package is

• Got a Yanwen number? Start here