Your own national postal service, in almost every case. China Post hands international packages to the destination country’s post office, which handles the final leg — Royal Mail in the UK, USPS in the States, Canada Post, Deutsche Post, Australia Post and so on. That’s why a package can arrive with your usual postie and nothing about it looking Chinese at all. The handover matters for tracking too: once your local post takes over, the scans come from them, and there’s often a new number attached. Small items usually come straight through the letterbox, while anything larger follows your local post’s normal rules for signatures and collection. So when it lands, your own postal service is who you’d talk to about delivery, not China Post.

Probably not, though the silence is genuinely uncomfortable. Standard shipping from China runs a few weeks door to door in normal conditions, and a large part of that produces no updates at all — the package is on a flight or a container, then waiting in a customs queue, and neither stage reports anything publicly. Two to three weeks of quiet after the export scan sits inside the range of ordinary. What changes the picture is the shape of your timeline rather than the length of the gap: an export scan followed by silence means your package left China and is in transit, which is exactly the normal pattern. Past a month with no arrival scan in your own country, it moves from slow to worth chasing — and your seller is who raises it, since the sender’s side is where enquiries start.

Watch the seller’s protection deadline more closely than the tracking, because that date is what actually protects your money. Marketplaces give you a window to raise a problem, and once it closes your options shrink dramatically no matter how justified you are. The practical rule: if your package hasn’t arrived and your protection period is within a week or so of expiring, open the dispute. It isn’t an accusation and it doesn’t stop the delivery — packages routinely turn up mid-dispute and the case closes happily. Most sellers will also extend the protection period if you ask before it lapses, which is worth doing the moment you start feeling uneasy. The one genuinely hard mistake to undo is waiting politely past the deadline hoping it arrives.

Expect a real delay and plan around it rather than fighting it. Factories, warehouses and delivery networks across China wind down for the holiday, and the effect runs longer than the holiday itself: orders placed just before it can sit unsent for days, and when things restart there’s a backlog to clear on top of normal volume. Two to three extra weeks is a reasonable expectation on standard shipping, sometimes more on the cheapest lines. Tracking behaves oddly around this window too — a label gets created and then nothing happens for a fortnight, which looks alarming but usually just means your package is waiting for its first collection. If you need something by a date in February, order well before the holiday rather than during it.

Usually yes these days, and it’s normally your own postal service that collects it. Most countries now charge tax from the first cent on imports rather than exempting small packages, so even a modest order can attract VAT or sales tax. How you pay depends on where you are and how you bought: many large platforms now collect the tax at checkout, in which case your package clears without you doing anything, while an order bought without tax collected gets assessed on arrival and your local post asks you to pay — by text, email or a card through the door — plus their own handling charge. The package waits until you’ve paid. The thing worth checking before you buy is whether there’s a tax line at checkout, because that one line decides whether a bill follows you home.

Because nobody scans a package mid-flight or mid-ocean, and the cheaper the line, the fewer the checkpoints. A postal package typically gets scanned when it’s collected, when it’s processed for export, when it arrives in the destination country, and then through the local delivery network — with a long unscanned stretch in the middle covering transport and the customs queue. Budget services scan less often than premium ones by design, since fewer handling points is part of what makes them cheap. So a timeline that jumps from a Chinese export scan straight to an arrival scan weeks later isn’t broken; it’s being honest about where visibility exists. Read the last confirmed scan rather than the silence after it.

You can, but do the maths before committing. Return postage from most countries to China costs a serious fraction of what small items are worth, the journey takes weeks, and the cheapest return options carry thin tracking — which matters when you need proof of return to get your refund. Before paying for anything, ask the seller how they want it handled: many will offer a partial refund instead of a return precisely because shipping it back costs more than the item, and marketplaces often land on that outcome anyway. If you do send it, use something trackable, keep the receipt, and give the seller the number straight away. For genuinely valuable items the return is worth it; for a small order, it rarely is.

Yes, and that’s precisely the gap we exist to close. When your local post takes over it often issues its own number, so the two halves of the journey end up on two different websites — the Chinese number frozen at export, the local one starting mid-story with no context. Add both here and we’ll link them into one timeline, so the whole trip reads in order instead of being pieced together. If you only have the Chinese number for now, keep an eye on your order page: the local number usually appears there once the handover happens, and you can add it then. Everything already tracked stays put, so nothing is lost when the second number turns up.

Nothing has gone wrong, but there are two useful things to do while you wait rather than refreshing. First, check your order page for a second tracking number. Once your package reaches your country the story often continues under a local postal number while the Chinese one stays frozen, and plenty of people conclude their package vanished when it was simply being recorded somewhere else. Add that number here and the two link up. Second, check your email and texts for a tax payment request, because an unpaid charge is the most common reason a package genuinely stops after arrival — and those messages get missed constantly. Beyond those two checks, patience is the right tool until you’re a month in, at which point your seller can raise a formal enquiry.

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

• Waiting on something from China?

• Keep an eye on United States deliveries

• Tracking made easy for Great Britain

• See deliveries to and from Brazil

• Where's your Russian Federation parcel?

• Follow your shipment in Germany

These carrier pages are worth a look too:

• Following a China EMS delivery?

• Yun Express tracking, step by step

• See where your 4PX package is

• Got a CNE Express number? Start here

• Check your Yanwen shipment

• SpeedPak updates in one place