CNFans review: the most open rate table in this series, and one number it will not show you

Agent review · independent · updated August 2026

This is the ninth agent review in this series and, like the others, everything below comes from what CNFans itself publishes: its pages, its production JavaScript, its public API responses, its legal documents and its DNS. Nothing is taken from a forum, a Discord or another review. Everything was read on 10 August 2026.

It is also the first one where we have had to hold two opposite conclusions at once. CNFans discloses more per shipping line than any agent we have priced — real delivery histograms, per-category restrictions, the volumetric rule written out in words. And the single number that determines what you actually pay, the exchange rate, is a private constant that sits about 17.6 per cent above mid-market. Both of those are true, and neither cancels the other.

1. The rates are genuinely public

CNFans' shipping calculator is a JavaScript application, and the module behind it is small enough to read in full. It calls three WordPress REST routes: a destination list, a category-feature list and the quote itself. The first two are marked in its own source as not needing a token. The third is marked as needing one — and the server does not enforce it. Our request carried no cookie and no authorisation header, and a complete priced table came back.

There is one obstacle, and it is the same one that defeats people at OrientDig. Call any logistics route plainly and you get HTTP 404, "no route was found". That reads like the endpoint does not exist. Add the static header the site's own front end always sends — From-Source-Type: PC — and the identical URL answers properly. It is not authentication; it is a shape check, and it means "we could not get their rates" is sometimes just the wrong request.

So we priced a parcel: 1,000 g of clothing to Great Britain. Seven lines came back, all from a single warehouse the API labels Jianyang, with no warehouse choice offered. Every figure below is in yuan, exactly as the API returns it — see section 3 for why we are not quietly converting it for you.

The spread from cheapest to dearest is 1.8× for the same parcel to the same address on the same day. As at every agent in this series, which line you pick matters more than which agent you pick.

2. Three things move the number before you see it

A flat ¥25 on every line. All seven quotes carry an identical operation fee of ¥15 and service fee of ¥10. It does not scale with weight or carrier. On the cheapest line the freight is ¥113 and the total is ¥138, so 18.1 per cent of that bill is not shipping. On a light parcel the fixed fee is the dominant cost, which is the same arithmetic that made the Netherlands page uncomfortable reading: fixed handling charges punish small orders hardest. The fees are in the API response, so a machine can read them — but the interface shows a total, and we searched the help centre without finding the ¥25 documented anywhere, while its about page describes charging the original product price with no hidden fees. Both are CNFans' own published material and we will leave them next to each other rather than characterise them.

Three lines bill 1 kg as 1.1 kg. The Royal Mail family lines charge a first 500 g and then continue in 200 g steps, so 1,000 g becomes 500 + 200 + 200 + 200 = 1,100 g. No volume is involved; it is pure rounding, and the API states it in a chargeableWeight field of its own. The step size is what matters and it varies enormously: EUB continues in 10 g steps and lands almost exactly on the true weight, eEms in 100 g, EMS-60 in 500 g, and CD-AIR in whole kilograms — so on that line a parcel one gram over 1 kg jumps an entire kilo. This is the same class of hidden rule we found at CSSBuy, where every line carried its own divisor and step.

And then the whole total is multiplied. That is section 3.

3. The quote is in yuan. The price you see is not.

This is the finding that made this page worth writing.

The rate endpoint always returns "currency":"CNY". We asked it for dollars as a header and as a query parameter; it returned the same yuan figures both times. The conversion happens in your browser, using a rate table CNFans publishes at another public endpoint.

We compared that table against European Central Bank reference rates. Every currency we checked was higher on CNFans, by a remarkably consistent margin:

Ten unrelated currency pairs, all landing between +17.4 and +18.0 per cent. Real exchange-rate variation does not behave like that. A band that tight is one constant multiplier, roughly 1.176, applied to a mid-market table.

Now the careful part, because this is where a review could overreach. We do not know what you are actually charged at payment. Checkout is behind a login, and we do not open accounts to write these pages. So we cannot tell you whether that 17.6 per cent is a foreign-exchange margin you pay, a buffer against rate movement, a bundled service margin, or something offset elsewhere in the order. Any of those is possible and none is inherently improper — payment processors and card networks add spreads too.

What we can say precisely is this: the number CNFans displays to you is not a mid-market conversion of the number its own API produced. If you want to know what a quote costs, take the yuan figure and convert it yourself. That is a thirty-second check and it is the only one on this page we would call essential.

4. Two lines that are slower and dearer at the same time

Look again at the table in section 1. CD-AIR quotes 15 to 30 days for ¥249.00. eEms quotes 10 to 20 days for ¥230.50. eEms is cheaper, faster at both ends of its range, and carries a better on-time figure in CNFans' own statistics — 94.63 against 91.51. There is no dimension on which CD-AIR wins. Same warehouse, same screen, same day.

That is the third independent case of this in the series, after Joyagoo and OrientDig. Three agents, three different rate systems, same pattern: a list of shipping options is not a price-versus-speed trade-off curve, and reading it as one loses you money.

One line deserves a defence, though, and it is worth spelling out because it shows why the headline range is a poor guide. UK-MG-Y costs ¥40 more than UK-RM-F and its quoted range ends a day later, which looks like the same mistake. It is not. CNFans' own delivery histogram shows 84.6 per cent of MG-Y parcels arriving within 15 days against 73 per cent for RM-F, with a near-perfect success rate. That ¥40 buys real reliability that the string "10–18 days" completely hides. You could only know that because the histogram is published — which brings us to the part of this review that is straightforwardly positive.

5. What it publishes that nobody else does

It would be easy to write this page as an exposé and it would be the wrong shape. On per-line disclosure, CNFans is the best agent we have looked at. Its public rate response includes, for every line:

• A delivery-time histogram. Not a range — an actual distribution. For the cheapest UK line: 3 per cent under 10 days, 72 per cent in 10 to 15, 18 per cent in 16 to 20, 7 per cent beyond. That is the single most useful shipping statistic in this market and almost nobody publishes it.
• The volumetric rule as a sentence. For the UK lines: length × width × height in centimetres divided by 8,000, and the greater of that and actual weight is charged. Written out, per line, not buried in a policy page.
• Per-category restrictions per line. On the cheapest UK line, clothing allows general cargo and ordinary brands but blocks international brands, luxury brands, built-in batteries and magnetic items — and wrist watches are blocked entirely, with an empty allow list. Knowing that before you order is worth a great deal more than finding out after.
• Hard weight and size caps. EUB stops at 2,000 g with a combined dimension limit; UK-MG-Y at 15 kg; the Royal Mail lines at 20 kg; eEms, CD-AIR and EMS-60 at 30 kg. CD-AIR also has a minimum of 500 g.
• Declared-value bands per line, and an honest freeInsure: false on all seven — no line pretends to include insurance at this weight.

Compare that with Hoobuy and OopBuy, whose rates cannot be read at all without an account. The contrast is real and it should count.

6. The same code as another agent

CNFans is a JavaScript front end on top of an ordinary WordPress and WooCommerce installation, which its own public API index states plainly, along with the site tagline "Your China Online Shopping Solution".

That index also lists the API namespaces the site registers, and it is here things get interesting. Alongside WooCommerce, Polylang, Jetpack and social login sit a set of bespoke namespaces that are not off-the-shelf anything. OrientDig's list is identical apart from one extra entry on CNFans. Every custom namespace matches — including one named cnfans, which is unremarkable on cnfans.com and quite remarkable on a competitor's domain, where we found it live four days ago. Both sites use the same From-Source-Type header gate.

The honest reading is a shared codebase: the same in-house plugin set running on both sites, with the original slug left in place. That is not proof of shared ownership, and we are not going to inflate it into one — a licensed platform, a white-label build or a fork by former staff all produce exactly this signature. We did not establish who owns what.

What it means for you is narrow and practical, and it is the fifth time this series has run into it after OopBuy and HahBuy, Joyagoo and Joyabuy and OrientDig: the brands in this market are a thinner layer than they look. Choosing between two agents on reputation may be choosing between two front doors on one building.

7. Who you would actually be contracting with

CNFans' terms name three companies as possible payment processors, depending on your location and payment method: STAR CREATION TECHNOLOGY CO. LIMITED in Hong Kong, STAR CREATION UK CO., LIMITED at a Cambridge address with a UK-shaped company number, and CHUANGOU TRADING LIMITED in Hong Kong. Multi-entity structures are completely normal and we are not suggesting anything improper. We did not query any companies register; these are the strings the site publishes.

Two gaps are worth knowing before you send money.

The section is titled "Governing law" and contains no governing law. It names the three payment entities, then discusses data sharing, and ends. There is no choice-of-law clause, no forum, no arbitration provision, and no jurisdiction named anywhere else in the terms either. If a dispute ever needed resolving, the document does not say whose rules apply.

The two legal documents contradict each other. The privacy policy has not been modified since March 2024; the terms were revised in May 2026. The privacy policy says personal information will never be sold or shared with third parties and that a registered account's data is kept permanently. The terms say data may be shared between the UK and Hong Kong entities, and that information will be deleted or anonymised on request. The privacy policy names no company at all, cites no data-protection regime and gives no erasure or portability rights; the terms invoke the UK GDPR and Hong Kong's Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance. These are not our claims about the company — they are the company's own two live documents saying different things.

One more, small but telling: both documents are published in ten languages by the site's translation plugin, and all ten copies are byte-for-byte identical English. A Polish or German customer has no legal document in their own language on a site that is otherwise localised into twelve.

For contrast, CSSBuy prints one company name and registration number in its footer on every page. That is what unambiguous disclosure looks like, and it costs nothing.

8. Smaller things worth knowing

• What you can buy. Its help centre says automatic link scraping works for Taobao, Tmall, 1688 and Weidian only; anything else — it names Xianyu, Pinduoduo and Youku — goes through a manual order form where you type the details yourself.
• It is largely invisible to AI assistants. Its robots.txt is entirely Cloudflare-managed and disallows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Bytespider, CCBot, Amazonbot, Applebot-Extended and meta-externalagent by name, while leaving ordinary search untouched. There is no sitemap declared and no real robots file at origin. So when you ask a chatbot about CNFans, it is not reading CNFans — it is reading forums and pages like this one. Which is an argument for reading a rate table yourself, on the agents that let you.
• Its corporate mail runs on Alibaba Cloud's business email, and one of its configuration endpoints returns a checkout notice in untranslated Chinese even when asked for English — including a note that payment times out after 15 minutes. Consistent with a mainland operating team, which is entirely expected in this market.

9. What we could not see

The rule this series runs on: where a door is closed, we say so rather than estimating.

• What you are actually charged at checkout. This is the important one, and it is the reason section 3 stops where it does. Cart quoting, order confirmation and payment are all behind a login.
• Membership tiers and any discount they carry, and any order-level service fee separate from the per-line ¥25.
• Ownership. Shared code is not shared ownership, and none of the three named companies mentions OrientDig or vice versa.
• Whether the dominated line is structural. Our quote is one weight, one destination, one day. Before treating CD-AIR as always a bad choice it should be re-run at other weights.
• Any company register. The three entities above are what the site prints. We did not look any of them up.

So should you use it?

On transparency of the shipping product itself, CNFans is the strongest agent we have reviewed — open rates, published delivery distributions, per-line restrictions and an honest statement about insurance. If you want to compare shipping properly rather than take a forum's word for it, this is one of the few places you can.

Weigh against that a ¥25 fixed charge on every parcel that hits small orders hardest, a ten per cent weight round-up on three of the seven UK lines, a set of legal documents that disagree with each other and name no governing law, and a displayed price built on a private exchange rate about 17.6 per cent above mid-market.

The practical advice is the same as it has been in all nine of these reviews, and it is not "use this agent". Price your actual basket, at your actual weight, to your actual address, at two or three agents whose numbers are readable — and when a quote is calculated in yuan, convert it yourself before you compare it to anything. Start from the full agent comparison, or read the other reviews where the rate tables were open: CSSBuy, Joyagoo, AllChinaBuy, Basetao, EastMallBuy and OrientDig. For what customs adds on arrival, see the customs and tax guide and the country pages for the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland.