How to do e-commerce on Xiaohongshu, summarizing these experiences from the cases of Dong Jie and Zhang Xiaohui

Xiaohongshu's live streaming e-commerce model started late, but has made initial progress. For example, the highest GMV of a single live broadcast by Dong Jie and Zhang Xiaohui reached 60 million. Xiaohongshu's live streaming e-commerce development faces an inevitable trend. It can learn from the successful model of Douyin but focus on differentiation, work hard on humanistic emotions, category selection and user recognition, and combine it with the advantages of content platforms and creators, which will surely achieve vigorous development of live streaming e-commerce and increase GMV.

There is no definite answer to this question yet.

But Xiaohongshu has already handed in its first answer sheet. The live streaming sales of celebrities such as Dong Jie and Zhang Xiaohui had a maximum GMV of 60 million in a single show.

Therefore, brands or bosses who want to sell products on Xiaohongshu should start researching now.

Throw out a few points of view and provide some ideas.

1. Xiaohongshu must engage in live e-commerce

Xiaohongshu's ability to promote products and the value of its high-quality users have been widely recognized.

This can lead to:

1) New brands or creative brands, in short, brands that are suitable for Xiaohongshu, will be promoted on Xiaohongshu. This is a step that will not be skipped in the marketing process.

2) Long-tail content creators can also monetize, which makes the entire industry have high hopes for the monetization of the Xiaohongshu platform and will continue to produce content.

But the problem is that seeding is only one part of marketing, and users still place orders on other platforms. Content creators’ income on Xiaohongshu is not high, so e-commerce must be developed.

Why live streaming e-commerce?

Although platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Video Account have many differences from Xiaohongshu, such as content tone and user structure, overall, they are still considered content platforms or short video platforms, so their models can be learned from.

Just like when Douyin started e-commerce late and lagged behind Kuaishou, users were not savvy, tools were not perfect, and most importantly, there was no representative figure in charge, and no one carried the banner.

Unlike Kuaishou, which has native anchors such as Simba, users are very willing to buy products, and many users think Kuaishou is a place to buy cheap goods. Moreover, the fans of native anchors have strong stickiness and loyalty, and the advantages of private domain traffic are particularly obvious, and the order conversion rate is particularly high.

At that time, if Douyin wanted to create a closed business loop, it had to do live streaming to sell goods, mainly doing three things:

1) Build the tool backend to facilitate anchors to invest in traffic and select products, which belongs to infrastructure construction;

2) Introducing Luo Yonghao to take up the banner of Douyin e-commerce and set an industry benchmark;

3) Encourage the top influencers on the site to start trying live streaming to sell goods. It is not enough to have only Luo Yonghao, the overall scale must keep up.

If these three points are met, Douyin e-commerce will quickly take off.

Back to Xiaohongshu, we can completely refer to Douyin in terms of business model, and we must develop live streaming e-commerce.

Not only did it complete the closed loop from seeding to pulling out, but it also broke through the GMV ceiling. This is of strategic significance to Xiaohongshu, and it must overcome this hurdle.

2. Xiaohongshu’s live streaming e-commerce should be benchmarked against Douyin

What should Xiaohongshu do to make live streaming e-commerce a success? There are many ways to explain this. This time I will talk about the simplest one, which is to benchmark against Douyin.

Why should we benchmark against TikTok?

1) TikTok is the largest content platform, and it is available on almost every smartphone in China;

2) Similar to Xiaohongshu’s current stage, Douyin also first developed content before moving into e-commerce;

3) Other products are not good competitors. Kuaishou’s typical users are just the opposite of Xiaohongshu, and Video Account is also exploring.

How to compete with TikTok?

The benchmarking mentioned here is not an overall or long-term strategy, but more like Xiaohongshu’s current entry point.

There are two core points: anchors and products. Let’s talk about anchors first.

It is related to the content, and the type of anchor determines the style of the live content.

Using hindsight analysis, Xiaohongshu platform is mainly promoting Dong Jie, Zhang Xiaohui, Zhang Jingchu, Vivi, Zhang Li, Jiang Sida and others. Dong Jie's single-game GMV is the highest at 60 million, and Zhang Xiaohui also has 50 million, which is a very good result.

From the anchors promoted by the platform, we can see these rules:

1) He is not a popular traffic star and his content pace is also very slow.

On Douyin, all the most popular and traffic-heavy stars are present, which also reflects the strength of this platform. Of course, the more popular the star, the more traffic and attention it attracts.

Moreover, the content style of Douyin live streaming is either entertainment-oriented like Xiao Yangge or fast-paced conversion-oriented like 123 Shanglian. Judging from the star types and content styles of Douyin, it is not suitable for Xiaohongshu.

Differentiated approach: Celebrities like Dong Jie are well-known enough, but they just don’t have explosive traffic. Instead, they are suitable for platforms like Xiaohongshu that lack explosive traffic. If you can’t be faster than Douyin, slow down.

2) Pay attention to tonality, rich social experience and cultural accumulation.

Xiaohongshu’s main recommendation is Dong Jie, Zhang Xiaohui and others, who have been in the entertainment or fashion circles for many years, have experienced ups and downs in their careers, and have many stories in their marriage and love lives. These rich social experiences make such women exude charm.

Only with inner accumulation can a sense of humanistic atmosphere be formed. When promoting products, you can talk about them in a leisurely manner and integrate your life attitude into the products, which will attract more young women in first- and second-tier cities. Unlike Douyin and Kuaishou, sincerity alone cannot win over Xiaohongshu users.

The key is to give users a sense of gain and identity from the perspective of humanistic atmosphere and social experience. It is necessary to have the ability to continuously output one's own values ​​and be accepted by users.

As for products, it’s much simpler.

We should start from Xiaohongshu's advantageous categories, such as beauty and clothing, whose target audiences are all young women, which is very clear. Moreover, the products they select are mainly selected by celebrities or niche treasures, not cost-effective, which is quite anti-mainstream overall.

This is the common rule of the anchors and products promoted on the Xiaohongshu platform, especially the difference from Douyin. Of course, this does not mean that this difference looks quite logical and high-end, so it is better than Douyin.

No.

These differences are merely the entry points for the Xiaohongshu platform at the current stage and can be considered a choice of competitive strategy.

Douyin's e-commerce coverage is definitely larger and has a higher ceiling. What Xiaohongshu is currently considering is how to develop e-commerce, and it is not yet at the stage of competing with Douyin in scale.

3. Brands selling products on Xiaohongshu can learn from the above experience

I have said so much above, the purpose is not to analyze the Xiaohongshu platform, but to gain some experience or rules to better help brands sell products on Xiaohongshu.

1) The experience of Douyin and Kuaishou cannot be directly copied on Xiaohongshu

Whether it is the anchor type or the product selection, Douyin, Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu have two different styles and cannot be copied. Otherwise, the platform and users will not like you and the effect will not be good.

2) Humanistic atmosphere and emotional resonance are the core of the content

Since cost-effectiveness is not important, the key lies in inner recognition. To gain recognition from users, we must be able to give them more information, knowledge, and experience, and reduce the output dimension. Brands can cultivate or find anchors who meet such conditions, and at the same time, they can also obtain platform traffic tilt.

3) Test the waters first and start with a few specific categories

For e-commerce, category is a very important choice. On the same platform, some categories are easy to do, while others are impossible to do. Choice is more important than effort. Obviously, beauty and women's clothing are the first choice for categories that fit the typical user profile of Xiaohongshu.

Author: Han Xu

Source: WeChat official account: "Operation Dog Work Diary (ID: yunyingriji)"