How can individual merchants start trading on Xiaohongshu at low cost? Attached is a low-cost strategy example

How can a business start an account on Xiaohongshu? When you think of starting an account, the first thing that comes to mind is to spend money, but there are also low-cost methods. Read this article to learn more.

How to start a business on Xiaohongshu with low cost? This is a question often asked by many individual merchants. Individual merchants are the most numerous merchants on Xiaohongshu. They have advantages in origin, supply, price, etc., but they do not have sufficient budget to invest in influencers and advertisements.

For individual merchants, the key is to get more natural traffic, conversion within Xiaohongshu, and global spillover. How can individual merchants start on Xiaohongshu at a low cost? There are five main ways: matrix personal account, matrix professional account, expert placement, Qianfan placement, and spotlight placement.
Note: The above 5 methods can be combined at will. Only professional accounts can be spotlighted. Let’s focus on the following analysis.

1. Introduction to low-cost strategies

Matrix personal account: Share product-related information in the tone of a personal merchant, hang business cards in notes, and guide conversions on the Xiaohongshu site.

The easiest way to enter Xiaohongshu is to create a personal account, open a potato shop, and produce content in batches. When the account has sales conversion, create personal accounts in batches, mainly for merchants in industries such as clothing, mobile phone cases, and books;

Figure 1: Mobile phone case individual merchants

Matrix professional account: Blue V certification logo, 600 annual fee, compared with personal account, professional account has stronger trust and is not easy to be blocked; the disadvantage is that after the merchant feedback certification, the natural traffic is average, the professional account can set up offline stores, 20 active greetings, and advertising traffic functions. ‍ ‍

Note: One business license can authenticate two professional accounts, and a store can also bind multiple professional accounts. After one professional account is running smoothly, the matrix professional accounts can sell goods.

Expert advertising: It is low-cost to operate Xiaohongshu, and finding experts to advertise is not for brand tone, but for selling goods. It is best for merchants to cultivate expert accounts to facilitate the adjustment of advertising content in the later stage.

In addition to rankings and horizontal tests, the content of expert notes is more about single product recommendations, from user pain points to scene implantation to products. The figure below shows common low-cost expert content.

Figure 2: Notes on the Expert Rankings‍ ‍

Qianfan delivery: The core is to promote conversion to the delivery background, with delivery purposes such as ROI orders and product visitors. In the early stage of opening a Xiaohongshu store, you can do Qianfan delivery operation first; ‍ ‍ ‍

Focus delivery: Compared with Qianfan, the focus delivery pool is larger, with the purpose of note planting, customer information collection, whole-site smart investment, etc. When your Qianfan encounters a bottleneck, it is recommended to use focus delivery directly. Let's take a look at the low-cost case of individual merchants.

2. Beauty salon Shengcaoquan

Shengcaoquan Beauty and Personal Care started as a personal store. The account has posted 105 notes and has 30,000 followers on Xiaohongshu. The content focuses on brand stories, popular science, shampoo and user reviews. It mainly sells Polygonum multiflorum shampoo, with an average customer price of 28 yuan/500ml;

According to the analysis of third-party data from Huitun, the account has gained 22,000 followers in one year, and the account has also grown in the past year. The rate of viral posts exceeds 16%, and the account started to gain momentum in September. There were viral posts in September, October, and November, which directly reflects that viral posts drive business growth.

Figure 3: Shengcaoquan Beauty and Personal Care Gray Pig Backstage Data

Looking through the blogger's notes on store management, he opened a store on Xiaohongshu in mid-May 2024, and the first hot article was published in July. There were subsequent hot articles in August, September, and October, which drove sales.

The following figure shows the four earliest popular articles of the blogger, three of which are sharing of good things and one of which is a popular science note. After the sales volume increases, the user reviews and other contents are updated. Judging from the content of the account in the early stage, the notes are mainly for personal sharing, with pictures taken by mobile phones and strong authenticity;

Figure 4: Contents of the first four notes of Shengcaoquan

After the personal account sales loop was closed, he began to register multiple accounts on Xiaohongshu for operation, including corporate accounts, personal accounts, and genuine stores.

Figure 5: Contents of the first four notes on Shengcaoquan

3. Clothing merchant XIAO Zhan Original Studio

XIAO Zhan Original Studio has quickly started recently, relying on natural flow + advertising. Its sweatshirt sales have exceeded 5 million+, making it the TOP1 sweatshirt brand on Xiaohongshu. Taobao has instead become a function of displaying its prices.

Figure 6: XiAO Zhan’s original studio

Unlike Shengcaoquan Beauty and Personal Care, it uses professional accounts + paid advertising, with a single account reaching 450,000 followers, becoming the industry's top account. As long as the ROI is positive, it will continue to use advertising.

The above 5 methods are low-cost ways for individual merchants to start Xiaohongshu. As for which method to adopt.

It depends on your current actual situation. If you have been using the paid approach, you can use Professional Account + Qianfan/Juguang. If you have strong natural traffic acquisition capabilities and have dedicated operators, you can collect official natural traffic in batches and do it in a matrixed and batch manner.

Author: Jiang He

WeChat public account: Jianghe Chat Marketing