Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1821
“LatePost” exclusively learned that Xiaohongshu has integrated e-commerce business and live broadcast business, and established a brand new trading department, which has become a first-level department parallel to the community department and the commercial department. Previously, the e-commerce business was a secondary department under the Ministry of Community.
Xiaohongshu’s chief operating officer, Conan (Potato name), is also the head of the new department. At the same time, she is also the person in charge of commercial products and business technology under the Ministry of Commerce. After the establishment of the new department, Xiaohongshu gradually found an e-commerce path that it recognized.
A person in the e-commerce business of Xiaohongshu revealed that Conan took the e-commerce team to Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Yiwu, Shenzhen and other places for research in June this year. These are a few cities that e-commerce platforms cannot avoid. They not only have rich sources of goods and mature supply chains, but also gather many bloggers and merchants with goods.
The research team believes that whether it is traditional shelf e-commerce providers such as Taobao and Pinduoduo, or Douyin’s live-streaming e-commerce providers, they all use strong incentives to attract users to impulsive consumption, which is not suitable for Xiaohongshu for the time being. In today’s competitive environment, building a new shelf requires extremely abundant traffic. Now it seems that even Douyin, which has more than 700 million users, is not easy to do; on the other hand, both models require the platform to have Enough and cheap enough goods can attract users.
“Xiaohongshu is still a community after all, and its core advantage is content. The team believes that promoting purchases through high-quality notes and live broadcast content should be a more suitable growth model for Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce.” A Xiaohongshu participated in the research sources said.
The live broadcast of traditional short video platforms focuses on goods and low prices. Xiaohongshu e-commerce focuses on “people” in its operation, hoping to attract buyers, shopkeepers and merchants who have content creation ability, delivery ability and operation ability, and they will guide users to trade through creating high-quality content. Dong Jie and Zhang Xiaohui’s live broadcast room is ideal. These two celebrities did not peddle, but spoke eloquently and explained carefully, and each sold more than 50 million yuan of goods in a single game on Xiaohongshu.
Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce will not pursue extreme richness and extreme low prices at present. “It is more efficient to encourage products that better match the user portraits of Xiaohongshu.” The above-mentioned Xiaohongshu e-commerce person said.
“LatePost” learned that the main products on Xiaohongshu are fashion, home furnishing, beauty and other categories. E-commerce platforms generally care more about transaction volume or order volume, while the Xiaohongshu e-commerce team also cares about how many of their users place orders every day, and lists DAB (daily average number of users who place orders) as one of the most important monitoring indicators one.
The number of daily active users (DAU) of Xiaohongshu broke through the 100 million mark at the beginning of this year, and then accelerated the commercialization process.
A person in charge of an MCN organization said that last year they did not respond to Xiaohongshu’s live broadcast invitation, “feeling that the strategy is very vague.” But since the beginning of this year, they have seen the signal that Xiaohongshu is investing heavily in e-commerce—more traffic is allocated to live e-commerce. Some well-known anchors of Taobao and Douyin have already intended to move their positions.
do different e-commerce
Xiaohongshu has already made a round of attempts in the e-commerce business in 2022: continue to introduce and support merchants, find products that meet the needs of Xiaohongshu; try different live broadcast styles. The success of live broadcast rooms such as Dong Jie and Zhang Xiaohui made the Xiaohongshu e-commerce team aware of the possibility of differentiation.
“In the early stage of a business development, we must first develop a differentiated mentality.” A person close to Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce business said.
Previously, Xiaohongshu used “useful” as a differentiated label for community content, and finally established the impression of “lifestyle search portal” on the user end. During the 2020-2021 epidemic, Xiaohongshu actively developed food and fitness content in addition to traditional beauty and fashion categories; in 2022, Xiaohongshu will also focus on sports and lifestyles such as camping, Frisbee, and Luchong content, these are rare on other content platforms.
In a survey in June this year, the Xiaohongshu e-commerce team found that most of the people who sold more products on Xiaohongshu at this stage focused on a certain segment, such as selling clothes specially designed for pear-shaped people. , “tennis style” outfits or furniture with a sense of design.
The person in charge of the above-mentioned MCN organization said that when the Xiaohongshu live broadcast team digs out the anchors with goods, they will not take the number of fans as the most important indicator, but focus on introducing creators with aesthetics or professional capabilities in certain fields.
Therefore, consumer electronics products such as mobile phones and TVs are not the most important industries for Xiaohongshu e-commerce at present, because other platforms have already achieved the extreme price and performance of such products. On the contrary, non-famous brand clothes with fashionable and novel designs or that can accurately match a certain body type are more likely to sell well in Xiaohongshu.
Beginning this year, the e-commerce department of Xiaohongshu began to increase its determination, hoping to recruit more buyers, shopkeepers and merchants with the above-mentioned capabilities. A Xiaohongshu e-commerce investment promotion person told LatePost that the platform will not be fully rolled out to cover all merchants.
“Xiaohongshu will not restrict the entry of merchants of any size.” The above-mentioned Xiaohongshu e-commerce business person said. In the fully competitive e-commerce industry, Xiaohongshu needs to gather buyers and merchants who are more suitable for this platform to solve the problem of “why users come”.
Taking into account community, content and e-commerce
How to integrate e-commerce and community is the constant challenge of Xiaohongshu.
As early as 2014, Xiaohongshu launched its own cross-border e-commerce business. In the first year of its launch, the GMV (sales) of Xiaohongshu e-commerce exceeded 300 million yuan, making it the e-commerce platform with the fastest GMV growth in the first year in China; third-party sellers.
An early employee who participated in the construction of the e-commerce business told LatePost that although Xiaohongshu e-commerce has been developing within the main product, it has always operated independently. Before 2021, it did not take any traffic from the community. Because the Xiaohongshu team believes that doing commercial realization when the DAU is not high enough will definitely disrupt the community ecology.
In 2020, the popularization of live e-commerce will allow Xiaohongshu to see new possibilities. But at first, the live broadcast room of Xiaohongshu was hidden very deeply. If a user wants to watch a blogger’s live broadcast, he must click to enter from the blogger’s flashing avatar and follow page.
In the second year, the number of daily active users of Xiaohongshu reached about 50 million, and it was the first time to send traffic to the e-commerce business-brands can attach product information and links to the published content.
After upgrading the trading department to a first-level department, Xiaohongshu’s community and e-commerce business have been further integrated, and the notes with goods linked to them and the live e-commerce content all appear in the information flow. Not long ago, Xiaohongshu also fully opened the function of bringing notes with goods, and bloggers with more than 1,000 followers can apply for publishing; at the same time, such notes can also be displayed in the recommended traffic of the community.
A Xiaohongshu e-commerce person said that the platform still uses the logic of content to recommend products. For example, if a notebook with goods wants to get traffic, it still needs the notebook itself to be attractive, not just to display the product. The platform also uses similar logic to decide which live room traffic to support.
Community products do not have a successful precedent for e-commerce. Douyin and Kuaishou products are more like media, and users are more likely to accept the insertion of “TV shopping” during viewing. But users of community platforms are more sensitive to interruptions.
Instagram’s revenue is mainly from advertising. Bilibili has not launched a large-scale self-operated e-commerce business so far, and the UP owner’s link with the goods is required to be placed in the comment area to reduce the commercial atmosphere in the community.
Founded ten years ago, Xiaohongshu has carefully established and maintained a unique community atmosphere. This time, Xiaohongshu has established a first-level department and invested heavily in e-commerce, which will continue to test its balance and patience.
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