SF Express opened 518 Heyke (嘿客) stores in a day — then rewrote the format

On 18 May 2014 SF Express opened 518 'Heyke' (嘿客) stores nationwide at once — community shops carrying little real stock, meant to funnel online orders from SF Best into an O2O network. By early 2015 the chain had pushed past about 3,000 stores, each opened at roughly ¥200,000 before rent and wages.

The stores could not sell. Monthly revenue ran ¥30,000–40,000 per store against a break-even of about ¥200,000, and over 70 percent of what came in was courier fees, not retail; features like fitting rooms went unused. Founder Wang Wei admitted in November 2014 that the business model was 'not yet perfect'; running the network was estimated at about ¥1 billion a year.

From 2015 the retreat was reframed as an upgrade: the online business merged into SF Best in April, all 11 Inner Mongolia stores closed in December, and over a hundred locations were relaunched as 'SF Home' (顺丰家) — while SF insisted nothing had closed. The experiment that began with 518 stores in a day ended as a footnote in SF's courier business.