China Internet Stats, Trends, Insights
About Xiaohongshu
Founded by Miranda Qu Fang and Charlwin Mao Wenfang in June 2013, Xiaohongshu, a.k.a. RED or Little Red Book, is a popular Chinese social e-commerce app/platform.
Xiaohongshu’s original product form in mid-2013 was “US Shopping Guide”, which was in PDF format. Xiaohongshu entered the market from the angle of overseas shopping and successfully captured a group of urban young women who are pursuing an exquisite lifestyle. Read its product growth story here.
For business specializing in cross-border e-commerce, Xiaohongshu is also an essential platform. See the comparison of Xiaohongshu with Kaola here.
It’s one of the top social media and influencer marketing platforms for brands in China; 70% of its users were born after 1990 (Generation Z).
Xiaohongshu’s monthly active users is over 100 million.
Xiaohongshu allows Chinese users, influencers (KOLs), and celebrities to post and share product reviews, shopping tips, travel blogs, and lifestyle stories through short videos and photos. It sells products through RED Mall.
In the five months after Xiaohong’s e-commerce model was launched, sales have reached more than 200 million yuan; as of May 2017, Xiaohongshu’s revenue was nearly 10 billion yuna.
HQ: Shanghai, China, with two other offices in Beijing and Wuhan.
Xiaohongshu website: https://www.xiaohongshu.com/
The platform is mobile-only; you can download the iOS or Android app on the website or app stores.
Other social media platforms: WeChat, Weibo, Douyin (TikTok), Zhihu, Douban.
Xiaohongshu Platform
The platform hosts nearly 10,000 third-party e-commerce merchants and brands and offers more than 100,000 different products.
More than 20,000 brands have community accounts on Xiaohongshu.
Fulishe is Xiaohongshu’s self-operated e-commerce platform, which integrates merchandising, warehousing, and customer service functions to provide users with a seamless e-commerce experience.
Xiaohongshu Business Model
First, word of mouth marketing.
There is no way to increase conversion rate more than real user word of mouth, just as users will definitely go to see user comments before buying on Taobao.
Xiaohongshu has a community of real-user word-of-mouth sharing, and the entire community is a huge library of users’ shared reviews.
Second, product selection based on big data.
Xiaohongshu’s community has accumulated a large number of consumer word-of-mouth as tens of millions of users have found and shared good things around the world on this platform.
In addition, users’ browsing behaviors, likes, and collections will generate a lot of data. Through these data, Xiaohongshu can accurately analyze the needs of users and ensure that the purchased products are highly praised by users.
Xiaohongshu’s History
Founded by Miranda Qu Fang and Charlwin Mao Wenfang in June 2013, it took 1,644 days to hit 100 million users from December 05, 2013 to June 06, 2018. As of January 2019, the number of its registered users has exceeded 200 million.
In October 2014, Xiaohongshu Welfare Society went online to solve another problem of cross-border shopping. Xiaohongshu accumulated overseas shopping data, analyzed the most popular products and global shopping trends, and on this basis, provided the world’s top products – “best value for money” to users in the shortest path and the most convenient way.
In June 2018, Xiaohongshu completed a $300 million funding led by Alibaba and Tencent, with a valuation of $3 billion.
In January 2019, Xiaohongshu launched its influencer platform.
On July 29, 2019, Xiaohongshu app was removed from Chinese Android app stores. On the morning of August 3, Xiaohongshu could not be found by search or downloaded in Apple’s App Store.
By July 2019, Xiaohongshu says it has over 300 million registered users, with 70% of the users born after 1990s, 80% of the users are females.
On the evening of October 14, Xiaohongshu was re-launched in app stores such as Huawei, OPPO, and App Store.
Five REDhomes, Xiaohongshu’s offline retail stores, are located in Shanghai, Changzhou, Suzhou, and Ningbo.
