More than 500 kinds of goods from 18 countries are in or have passed through the free trade zone warehouse. By June 4, Ningbo Customs Office had reviewed 46,877 declarations of imported goods worth 15.06 million yuan.

A total of 22,269 customers from 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions and Hong Kong had bought goods through the website.

Yang Guoxun, vice-director of the Advisory Committee For State Informatization, says the e-commerce operation aims to standardize overseas purchases, called haitao in Chinese, which have become increasingly popular in China in recent years.

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"The normal overseas purchase service is provided by individuals who are living overseas. They buy goods for customers in China and post them in packages. For customs offices, it is very difficult to charge duty on these packages. For the customers in China, it is hard to check the authenticity of the products, and there is no after-sales service."

A report published by China E-Commerce Research Center says overseas purchases for the Chinese market reached 76.7 billion yuan last year, an increase of almost 60 percent on the year before.

The cross-border service will become an important element of China's e-commerce industry, Yang says.

Last year, the total value of sales through China's traditional e-commerce was 1.85 trillion yuan, 42.3 percent higher than in the previous year.

With government policy support, the growth of cross-border e-commerce will soon outstrip that of overseas purchases, Yang says.

"After all, the website has official policy backing, and for customers it is a better shopping experience."

Ningbo is one of five cities granted the right to run such an e-commerce operation. The others are Chongqing, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Zhengzhou.

Xia Qun, deputy director of the administrative committee of the Ningbo free trade zone, says it has certain advantages over the other four cities.