Can Xiaohongshu e-commerce break the salesgirl logic?

This article deeply analyzes the live broadcast model of Xiaohongshu e-commerce, and explores how it breaks the traditional "saleswoman logic" and achieves a dual increase in brand voice and sales through K-broadcast and store broadcast. From Xiaohongshu's differentiation strategy to the real value display of merchants, this article reveals to readers the uniqueness and challenges of Xiaohongshu's e-commerce ecosystem.

After a year of focusing on live streaming e-commerce, Xiaohongshu has gained new insights and solutions.

Last August, Xiaohongshu started telling the story of K-broadcast (buyer live broadcast). Dong Jie and Zhang Xiaohui quickly became popular with their eloquent and detailed explanations, setting a good example for Xiaohongshu live broadcast. Xiaohongshu opened the door to live broadcast e-commerce.

Ten months later, Xiaohongshu launched store broadcasting. The audience that merchants have planted and buyers have penetrated can be taken over through store broadcasting, forming a closed loop of operation, just like the logic of Taobao and Douyin store broadcasting.

One direct manifestation is that Xiaohongshu has increased its support policies during the 618 period. On Super Store Broadcast Day, it aggregates resources within the site for merchants with GMV exceeding 500,000 to help them achieve their single-game goals. At the same time, it distributes large coupons every day to the live broadcast rooms participating in the event to promote conversions in the live broadcast rooms.

In essence, Xiaohongshu hopes to achieve dual-wheel drive through K-broadcasting and store broadcasting, so that merchants can have both voice and sales.

This is not a unique expectation of Xiaohongshu. Taobao and Douyin have also regarded store broadcasts as the focus of their efforts. After all, compared with live broadcasts by influencers or buyers, store broadcasts are the most cost-effective and the most stable and lasting form of relationship between platforms and brands.

But this is not an easy task. Currently, no Taobao live streaming store has sales that can surpass the top anchor Li Jiaqi.

Douyin is also struggling to explore. Feigua data shows that as of June 15, the average number of viewers for the live broadcast of Youhuixingxing in June reached 7.607 million, while the average number of viewers for the self-operated live broadcast of food and beverage brands was 17,000, a difference of more than 400 times.

What's more, Xiaohongshu's live e-commerce pursues a narrative style that is leisurely and refuses to shout out sales, and its essence is to break away from the "saleswoman" logic.

For platforms and merchants, this means a long uphill climb.

01 Differentiation of Xiaohongshu Store Broadcast

If the value of cooperation between brands and buyers lies in expanding brand awareness and releasing brand influence in the early stages, then the significance of brands doing their own store broadcasts lies in taking on traffic and building a position for sustainable operations.

This is the core path for most merchants on Xiaohongshu at present: BK (B stands for brand, K stands for buyer) matchmaking for cold start and in-store broadcasting for stable operation, Gintoki, head of e-commerce operations at Xiaohongshu, shared at the 618 media exchange meeting.

Simply put, cooperating with buyers is to build a business, and doing store broadcasting by yourself is to stabilize the business. Buyers plus store broadcasting are conducive to merchants forming a complete business closed loop, which is also the dual-wheel drive currently advocated by Xiaohongshu.

More and more businesses are trying to conduct store broadcasts on Xiaohongshu. This is directly reflected in the data: during the 618 period, the GMV of Xiaohongshu store broadcasts reached 5 times that of the same period last year. The number of store broadcasts with sales exceeding 100,000 per show was 4 times that of the same period last year.

The home furnishing industry is a representative of significant growth. The overall average order value of this category is high, and customers take a long time to make decisions, making it difficult to convert directly from notes.

Brand store broadcasts can take over the demand that has not been converted by the in-site seeding or buyer live broadcast rooms, and can also accumulate their own private domain traffic pool. Store broadcasts have become the main force of live broadcast sales. At present, the overall penetration rate of designer home brands has reached nearly 70%.

Designer home furnishing brand Zhiwu was one of the first to feel the impact. Zhiwu's manager Nie Ping said that store broadcasting can make up for the lack of scene presentation and timely communication, better listen to users' voices, and solve user pain points. Last year on Double Eleven, Zhiwu planned a large live broadcast with a GMV of over 150,000. Nie Ping recalled happily, "The team was so happy."

Long-term operation is the common vision of all merchants. In addition, store broadcasting also means greater autonomy. The team, cost, and goods are all in the hands of merchants. Compared with finding buyers to cooperate, it can also save a sum of "agency fees".

Finding a store broadcasting methodology that matches the platform's tone is Xiaohongshu's next proposition. Various platforms are also actively exploring this.

Taobao adjusted the positioning of store broadcasts last year, transforming store broadcasts from a marketing tool to a new platform for merchants to operate. Unlike shelf e-commerce, store broadcasts follow the logic of hot products. To this end, Taobao reorganized the products and provided platform subsidies to promote the growth of merchants' business.

Nowadays, content has become an important weapon to increase user retention time, and more businesses and platforms have realized the value of content.

On this basis, Xiaohongshu has formed a differentiated strategy based on the user characteristics and community atmosphere of the platform.

Xiaohongshu proposed a simple live broadcast initiative. The core is to let the anchor be himself, use straightforward content, simple and pure explanations, and introduce products from the perspective of consumers.

Li Li, the manager of Yujian, believes that the price mechanism should not be emphasized, but the characteristics of the product itself and the story of product development should be told in a leisurely and refined language.

Before the first store broadcast, the Yujian team did a lot of preparation, such as adjusting the speech speed, setting up scenes, setting up product combinations, etc. This created an atmosphere where the live broadcast room shared not only products, but also aesthetics, values ​​and lifestyles.

Li Li told Xinmei Daybreak that their K-broadcast and store-broadcast on Xiaohongshu account for about 70% of the total revenue and have become a daily business operation path.

Samp, an operator of the home furnishing category of Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce business, shared that, taking the furniture category as an example, Xiaohongshu has already developed two relatively mature store broadcast models.

One is to invite interested users to the brand event through store sales or live broadcasts, where the brand manager or chief designer will explain the brand and use the price mechanism to convert the users. Under this model, the home furnishing category has seen multiple brand events with sales of hundreds or even five million.

The other is to test products through daily notes, put products on the shelves in the live broadcast room, and complete the whole closed loop from planting to pulling. Under this model, many store live broadcast accounts with monthly sales exceeding 500,000 have been incubated, and some Xiaohongshu native brands have even exceeded 1 million.

Social media sharing is also a practical way to play store broadcasting. Li Li believes that "social media is a treasure trove of private domains for increasing transaction conversion rates."

There will be activities such as sharing orders and trying out packages in the community, and you can also communicate with users in a timely manner. This will greatly increase the conversion rate of fans in the live broadcast room. Li Li shared that the conversion rate can sometimes reach 12%-15%, which is a very high number.

However, Gintoki said that Xiaohongshu did not focus on the differentiation of store broadcasts. The core thinking of the team is to truly restore the true value of each brand, each buyer, and each merchant. This includes brand concepts, personal life interests, styles, feelings, etc.

02 Difficulty of Store Broadcasting

Whether it is brand communication or commodity trading, brands have beautiful expectations for Xiaohongshu, but not everyone can find a way to achieve it.

The main merchants with excellent store live broadcast performance have gone through a brand development process on Xiaohongshu. Some of them are niche brands or growing brands, and some even design products based on the characteristics of Xiaohongshu users. They are also the group that explored the Xiaohongshu live broadcast path relatively early.

Most brands start with live broadcasts by buyers. Merchants find buyers who are more compatible with their products and use the influence of buyers to increase brand awareness and expand the user base.

Afterwards, the brand will launch store broadcasts to take in traffic, communicate in depth with its core users, and form a stable operating position.

After completing the first two steps, they will form a transaction path of "notes + live broadcast + community" linkage on Xiaohongshu. They will plant seeds in the notes on the site to accumulate fans; then carry out K broadcast or store broadcast to connect with more accurate users; and simultaneously transform to community operation to accumulate private domain traffic pool and increase repurchase rate.

However, not all brands can run this complete path without barriers and at low cost. For many brands, store broadcasting is something that is difficult to achieve short-term results and requires long-term investment.

Taobao store broadcast is a reference.

The most basic problem is that compared with influencers and buyers, merchants are weaker in producing content. This is not their area of ​​expertise.

During last year's Double 11, Dao Fang, then head of Taobao Live, said that e-commerce live streaming is returning to its essence, and merchants' professionalism in goods and prices will be more prominent. But he also admitted that one of the problems of merchants is that they are not very interesting. This requires merchants to spend more effort on content output.

In addition, the product organization and price mechanism of store broadcasts were exactly the same as those on shelves in the past, which resulted in consumers having no reason to enter the live broadcast room. Last year, Taobao urged merchants to reset the format and product organization of the live broadcast room, and the platform also gave merchants red envelopes or subsidies for this.

This means that merchants cannot just use store broadcasting as a marketing tool, but need to invest more resources and energy. They even need to dynamically adjust the product organization according to real-time data changes.

Xiaohongshu will also encounter the same problems as Taobao, and it may even be more difficult.

First of all, the characteristics of the platform itself determine that Xiaohongshu's live e-commerce has higher requirements for content, and users are the most discerning in their aesthetics.

Compared with other platforms, Xiaohongshu users have better discernment and aesthetic ability. They have higher requirements for products and content, and store broadcasts need high-quality content output to retain these users.

Li Li, the manager of Yujian, said that the notes on Xiaohongshu are a real test of content capabilities, and they pursue altruistic popular content that wins with quality. This requires providing users with professional content, such as body care methods and steps, and then adding specific KOL recommendations, such as cooperating with supermodels.

In addition, brands even need to reverse engineer product design based on the needs of Xiaohongshu users. Nie Ping, the owner of Zhiwu, shared that based on user feedback, they basically launch new products every month, and at the same time, they will bring the first launch benefits and large-scale benefits to Xiaohongshu.

Nie Ping described Xiaohongshu as a mobile booth, "a place where goods find people, using good products/good tastes and content output to find the most suitable group of people." This feature makes Xiaohongshu more suitable for brands, but it also means that merchants are shifting their focus from price to content.

This is directly reflected in the live broadcast process. Li Li requires himself and his team to speak slowly during live broadcasts and change the background board once a month. The slow and leisurely narration style has basically become the standard for Xiaohongshu live broadcasts. They don't want to be equated with the general live broadcast, and they want to jump out of the logic of the salesgirl.

Not all brands can adapt to Xiaohongshu at such a cost and without regard for attitude.

One detail is that currently, the brands that are most actively trying out live streaming on Xiaohongshu are mainly niche brands. The K-broadcasting and store broadcasting rates of mature brands or more widely known mass brands on Xiaohongshu are still unknown.

In this regard, Gintoki explained to Newberry Daybreak that when communicating with all brands, they only care about two things: brand building and sales. "The trend we see is that after the brand is promoted, it interacts with more users through K-broadcast or store broadcast, which in turn generates direct sales, and the depth of brand awareness can be deeper."

Judging from the actions of mass brands that are currently known, they are more based on brand building and dissemination in the Xiaohongshu content field. If live broadcasting becomes a normal window for brands to communicate with users, an important sign of the maturity of Xiaohongshu's e-commerce ecosystem is that it will also make an important contribution to the sales of mass brands.