Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Zhu Xixi, a user of the Little Red Book Welfare Society, while browsing the Little Red Book on September 15, saw a letter "farewell, but also the beginning" from the welfare society to users, saying that the welfare society would stop selling goods on October 16 and officially close the store on November 16.

Zhu Xixi was surprised. She recalled that the first time she downloaded Little Red Book in 2015 was to buy products that she used when she was studying abroad, but it was difficult to buy them when she returned home. At first, relying on overseas shopping strategies and direct purchases of minority goods, Little Red Book attracted a group of seed users like her.

The source of Little Red Book e-commerce is the welfare society, but today, more Little Red Book users often check the mouth red number and skin care secret books in Little Red Book, and are recommended by clothing with a sense of design, source fruit, and so on, and then through notes or live rooms. Under the "Little Red Book first order".

In nine years, Xiao Hongshu has completed its "transformation", from overseas shopping strategy sharing platform and women's community to a lifestyle community of 260 million monthly active users in 2022. The proportion of male users has also increased from single digits to 30%, and the majority of the population has changed from white-collar workers to post-90s and post-950s with more than 70%.

In response to the changes in the needs of users, in the e-commerce business, the welfare society is only one of many businesses. Little Red Book was introduced to third-party merchants in 2016, and live streaming began in 2020 with the arrival of a large number of merchants. Little Red Book attaches importance to the combination of "content + e-commerce", and it also comes out of a characteristic model which is different from traditional shelf e-commerce such as Taobao and JD.com. In 2023, Little Red Book started a new round of integration and adjustment of e-commerce business, and the whole sector also entered a stage of rapid development.

For Little Red Book, the historical mission of the welfare society has been completed. Focus on the integration of content and e-commerce, is the future of Little Red Book e-commerce.

01 the welfare society from "asking for links"

There was a "pain point" in early Little Red Books: many users were "recommended" by the products in their notes, only to find that there was no place to buy them.

Zhu Xixi, a user of Little Red Book, is like this. She "recommended" a number of brands on the French must-buy list and Japan must-buy list. When studying in France, she will also buy products for domestic friends and customers. However, after returning home, many minority brands have cut off their purchasing channels.

Before and after 2014, in the comments section of Xiaohongshu, and even in the comments of App Store, many users always asked, "the notes for reading Xiaohongshu are always recommended, but there is no way to buy them directly. How can I buy them?"

This triggered the thinking of the internal team of Little Red Book, whether or not to develop the e-commerce section. At that time, Xiao Hongshu had just started, with only more than 20 employees, and had just completed round A financing.

At that time, the domestic Haitao industry was in the ascendant, the new generation of female consumers' consumer awareness of international brands was rapidly awakening, and the market also needed a reliable Haitao platform. A potential opportunity is just around the corner. Moreover, to maintain the vitality of a community platform, we need a two-pronged approach of content and commercialization to form a sustainable ecological closed loop. To be an e-commerce business is one of the things that best meet the needs of users in front of Little Red Book.

Half a year after brewing, at the end of 2014, the welfare society went online in Little Red Book. A large number of minority products have been pushed out, and the welfare society has won the trust of many consumers, with sales reaching more than 200 million yuan five months after it was launched. The red express boxes are the first overseas shopping experience for many girls. And the welfare society has also become a key "weight" for Little Red Book to attract users in the early stage.

Different from the traditional e-commerce model, the welfare society is closely integrated with the content of Little Red Book from the very beginning. In the early days, the welfare society did not set up pre-sales consultation, the product description was only given 140 characters, and the "eight-character motto" was required to summarize the key information of the product. Not really can only use eight words, but to use as short as possible to say the core selling point, the attraction of the product.

At that time, the team further proposed that copywriters should "speak human words." Zhu Xixi bought an umbrella in her first order and introduced it as "sunscreen and beautiful". She was impressed by the fact that she had bought a detergent, and the title of the product used eight words-"it smells like sunshine after washing." all of a sudden, Zhu Xixi caught Zhu Xixi's heart and seemed to feel a clean and warm feeling across the screen.

While paying attention to copywriting, the welfare society, as a self-operated e-commerce business, pays more attention to the accurate selection of small red book users.

Welfare society products purchase ideas according to community notes, such as the high exposure rate of goods in the community, the largest collection of goods and so on. "We have a community where big data can analyze users' needs, and can also directly contact brands and manufacturers to match users' needs with their products," said a buyer from the welfare society. "

In addition, Xiaohongshu also began to excavate the popular styles in the station, found new product trends, and formed a trend through procurement.

When Zhu Xixi was a purchasing agent for his friends in France, the goods that many friends wanted to buy were recommended in Little Red Books. In her memory, Zuma long perfume, Philoga's mask and swisse's enzymes were all the first to become popular on Little Red Books.

Then, the welfare society also continued the advantage of this mining trend. "I think the biggest feature of the welfare society lies in its foresight, and its products and users are ahead of the whole market." Zhu Xixi said.

For a long time since the launch of the welfare society, Xiao Hongshu has also been thinking about how to express the relationship between the community and e-commerce more clearly and make App easier to use.

At first, many new users were confused about how to get into e-commerce. In one version, the Little Red Book team wants to maintain the niche design of Little Red Books, with only icons and no text for navigation. It was not until the product owner found that the user could not find the purchase page that he added text to the navigation, and then changed the name of "welfare society" to the more obvious word "purchase" in a certain version.

It was 2016, the third year of the establishment of Little Red Book and the second year of the launch of the welfare society. It was also in that year that Little Red Book began to move towards the stage of "relative popularity".

02 Little Red Book e-commerce expansion

The first order placed by user Sherry with welfare was in October 2015. Since then, Sherry has become an early loyal consumer of the welfare society, including Japanese vegetable cleaners, American masks, Korean sanitary napkins and Australian health products. She dug up goods from all over the world from shopping orders.

After many minority brands became popular on Little Red Books, they have entered other channels one after another. At this time, Little Red Book is also exploring a new path from "minority" to "mass". One or two can be seen from the evolution of its Slogan.

Before 2016, Xiaohongshu's Slogan was "finding good things abroad" and "good things all over the world" and was positioned as a platform for Haitao. After 2016, the Slogan of Xiao Hongshu changed to "the good Life of the World" and "Mark my Life", and further put forward the "Guide to the Life of 200 million people". This means that Little Red Book focuses its business on the expansion of community content and the growth of users. The content community has become the main tone of Little Red Book in the new stage.

Since then, the Little Red Book has ushered in an explosion of content and users. In June 2015, Xiaohongshu had 15 million users. By 2022, Xiaohongshu has more than 260 million monthly active users, with content ranging from shopping, makeup and clothing to food, travel, outdoor, games, workplace and so on. In terms of users, the proportion of male users has increased from less than 10% to 30%, and the majority of the population has changed from white-collar workers to post-90s and post-950s with more than 70%.

The change of community attribute has given Little Red Book new commercial value, and the "recommendation" culture has gradually grown into a "recommendation" economy. In the past few years, Little Red Book has become a must for brands to do online marketing, and many new domestic consumer brands, such as perfect Diary, Yuanqi Forest, Bubble Matt, Huaxizi, Colorkey, Ubras, Zhong Xuegao, and so on, have also hatched from Little Red Book.

This in itself confirms the potential of Little Red Book as a content community-it can accommodate more commercial content.

In 2016, Xiaohongshu opened up third-party merchants to move in, the number of SKU in the platform increased to 150000, and Xiaohongshu became an e-commerce platform that combines proprietary and platform models. E-commerce is an important part of the Little Red Book business closed loop-the brand is put on the Little Red Book, the blogger produces the content on the Little Red Book, and the user is "recommended" on the Little Red Book. To the final transaction link, Little Red Book also hopes to complete it on its own platform.

In the second half of 2021, Little Red Book acted frequently. After the launch of "shop as a whole", we will open up the store system in the station, open public domain traffic to small and medium-sized and individual businesses, and shorten the distance between content and transactions.

In 2022, Little Red Book showed more determination about the e-commerce business. The e-commerce team spent a year on "infrastructure", that is, improving the portal and page of e-commerce based on user experience, and exploring how to combine e-commerce with community content.

One of the important scenarios is "Commodity Notes", in which merchants can access product links in the published notes so that users can see what they get. Through the analysis of user preferences, merchandise notes can also enter the feed stream of community content to achieve exposure. It is reported that "Commodity Notes" is one of the fastest growing sectors of Little Red Book e-commerce.

Another fast-growing e-commerce sector is live streaming. According to Xiaohongshu, from January to April 2023, compared with the same period in 2022, the number of monthly live broadcasts in Xiaohong bookstore increased by 29% compared with the same period last year, and the number of monthly live broadcast users increased by 220% compared with the same period last year.

With the increase in the number of users, Xiaohongshu also needs to think further, when people continue to use "looking for links" to express their willingness to buy-the data show that among the daily active users of Xiaohongshu, the number of users who intend to buy is nearly 40 million. In 2014, in order to meet the "link" needs of light users, welfare societies were born; today, after the emergence of more purchase demand, Xiao Hongshu needs to give an answer that is more in line with this stage.

03 the new era of small red book e-commerce

For e-commerce, Xiao Hongshu has been exploring a characteristic e-commerce model that is consistent with its own community attributes.

Among the three elements of e-commerce, Xiao Hongshu's e-commerce wants to take people out as the core role. This is also the reason why Xiao Hongshu mentioned the most important role of "buyer" not long ago. The "recommendation culture" in Little Red Book urges brands, talented people, and merchants to produce high-quality content that attracts consumers. through the analysis of user behavior, the platform learns the needs of users, and finally puts the goods accurately on the users' reading page. arouse users' interest and purchase.

Bamboo is a new generation of Little Red Book users who began to use Little Red Book around 2020 and is now a senior buyer of Little Red Book e-commerce. She not only searches for makeup strategies on Little Red Books, but also is often "recommended" for all kinds of goods, such as snacks, gravy, fruit, ice cream, and even mobile phone cases and small toys for her daily pastime.

Bamboo said that Xiao Hongshu's "merchandise notes" are more informative, and video ads will also make food products more attractive and always stimulate her shopping desire. Moreover, the emotions conveyed by many posts also make her feel more real. Take buying fruit as an example, her feeling is: "it obviously feels more personal than other platforms, as if he really grew it at home."

This year, she bought a lot of yellow peaches and grapes, and even bought a special one for her mother.

It is not difficult to see that the core of Little Red Book e-commerce is still "content". The platform attribute of Little Red Book also allows businesses to introduce their own brand concepts, ideas and stories through pictures and text. It is also under the influence of this characteristic that some non-standard products perform well in Little Red Books, such as independent designer products, creative goods under popular culture, or practical goods suited to the scene.

In the live broadcast with goods, Xiao Hongshu is also looking for a suitable live broadcast style for its own platform. After investigating the users' preferences, Little Red Book found that everyone was numb to the shouting live broadcast, and the Little Red Book users preferred the live broadcast with texture.

This year, Little Red Book has gradually found its position. Stars represented by Dong Jie and Zhang Xiaohui share all aspects of their lives in the community, and they are more willing to be friends when they talk live, rather than the traditional low-cost, promotion-oriented live streaming. These characteristics have enabled them to successfully break the circle.

On September 6, Yi Nengjing opened the premiere of Little Red Book, occupying the first place on the list of Xiaohong books with the unique way of "Live Healing". The whole live broadcast for nearly 9 hours, the main categories of goods are beauty care, internal health care and health food. The number of viewers in the live broadcast reached 1.667 million that night, with sales exceeding 14 million. Before the live broadcast, Yi Nengjing continued to share all kinds of good products she had used in the community, and the comment area often asked, "what brand is XXX" and "where to buy it?"

Not only stars, but also ordinary people have a good performance in the live broadcast of Little Red Books. In early June, blogger "short head Flower" launched a live broadcast on Xiaohongshu, with the first GMV reaching 7 million yuan; and a home buyer, "a KK," which can sell for 20 million yuan per live broadcast during the period of June 18.

Since 2023, Xiao Hongshu's plan for e-commerce has become more and more clear, and she has begun to speak out more.

According to media reports in August, Xiao Hongshu integrated e-commerce business with live broadcast business and set up a new trading department, which is parallel to the community department and the commerce ministry as a first-tier department. Previously, the e-commerce business belongs to the secondary department under the Ministry of Community, and the live broadcast business is an independent department.

Also in August, Xiao Hongshu held a link e-commerce partner week "buyer's time has come" theme talks in Shanghai. This is also the first time for Little Red Book e-commerce to speak out to the outside world as a whole. At this conference, COO Conan pointed out the development direction of Little Red Book e-commerce in the next stage: "invite more Little Red Book buyers, managers, merchants and brands to join us to build a more prosperous e-commerce ecology."

In 2017, Zhu Xixi changed from a user of Little Red Book Welfare Society to a buyer of Little Red Book. In the process of identity change, one of her deep feelings is: "after the brand makes recommendations in Little Red Books and combines content with recommendations, I think some consumption trends and shopping habits can be created."

She cited enzymes as an example. In the past period of time, enzymes sold very well in the market, and many domestic and foreign brands created momentum on Little Red Books. And Zhu Xixi is also looking for sources of goods all over the world, through price comparison, to introduce the most cost-effective goods into China. Under the joint construction of brands, platforms and buyers, a new trend has emerged.

These early operational thinking, continue to continue in the small red book station. Similar trends have appeared in many small red books, such as early C and late A, kale juice, Morning eight makeup, and so on. The birth of each new trend is a focus on the needs of users, which in turn affects the shaping of the industrial chain and gives birth to huge opportunities.

In the farewell letter to close the welfare society, Xiao Hongshu once again mentioned: "in order to better meet the fast-growing needs of users, Xiaohongshu will concentrate resources and strength to serve the development of more buyers, managers, merchants and brands in e-commerce."

Judging from these actions, Xiao Hongshu is determined to take a new step in the field of e-commerce.

(Zhu Xixi, bamboo and Sherry are aliases)

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