What is Xiaohongshu? Xiaohongshu Review

1. Xiaohongshu Community

Unlike other e-commerce platforms, Xiaohongshu started as a community. At first, users focused on sharing their overseas shopping experiences in the community. Later, in addition to beauty and personal care, Xiaohongshu began sharing information about sports, travel, home furnishings, travel, hotels, and restaurants, touching on all aspects of consumer experience and lifestyle. Today, the community has become Xiaohongshu's barrier, and it is also something that other platforms cannot replicate.

In early 2016, Xiaohongshu changed its manual content management to machine distribution. Through big data and artificial intelligence, the content in the community is accurately matched to users who are interested in it, thereby improving the user experience.

2. Xiaohongshu e-commerce

In October 2014, Xiaohongshu Welfare Club was launched to solve another problem of overseas shopping: not being able to buy something. Xiaohongshu has accumulated overseas shopping data, analyzed the most popular products and global shopping trends, and based on this, provides users with the best things in the world in the shortest way and the simplest way.

The uniqueness of Xiaohongshu e-commerce lies in:

First, word-of-mouth marketing. There is no way to improve conversion rate better than real user word-of-mouth, just like users will definitely read user reviews before buying things on Taobao. Xiaohongshu has a community where real users share word-of-mouth, and the entire community is a huge user word-of-mouth database. Second, product selection under structured data. Xiaohongshu's community has accumulated a large amount of consumer word-of-mouth, just like tens of millions of users discover and share good things from all over the world on this platform. In addition, users' browsing, liking and collection behaviors will generate a large amount of underlying data. Through this data, Xiaohongshu can accurately analyze user needs and ensure that the purchased products are highly praised by users.

In the five months since Xiaohongshu launched its e-commerce model, its sales have reached more than 200 million yuan; as of May 2017, its revenue was nearly 10 billion yuan.

On June 6, 2017, the anniversary day of Xiaohongshu, sales reached 100 million yuan two hours after the sale started; on that day, Xiaohongshu ranked first in the shopping category of Apple APPStore; in 2016, the number of products participating in Xiaohongshu's "66" promotion was 10,000, which increased to 150,000 in 2017.

3. Development History:

In June 2013, Xiaohongshu was established in Shanghai

In December 2013, Xiaohongshu launched an overseas shopping sharing community

In March 2014, Xiaohongshu completed a multi-million dollar Series A financing.

In August 2014, the Android version of Xiaohongshu was launched

In November 2014, Xiaohongshu completed a USD 10 million Series B financing led by GGV.

In December 2014, Xiaohongshu officially launched the e-commerce platform "Welfare Club", upgrading from a community to an e-commerce platform and completing the commercial closed loop.

In December 2014, Xiaohongshu released its global awards, and the award list was widely used by duty-free shops in Japan and South Korea and overseas merchants, becoming a benchmark for outbound shopping;

At the beginning of 2015, Xiaohongshu's Zhengzhou self-operated bonded warehouse officially started operation

In May 2015, Xiaohongshu reached a strategic cooperation with Blackmores, the largest health product brand in Australia;

In May 2015, with zero advertising, Xiaohongshu Welfare Club achieved sales of over 200 million in half a year.

In June 2015, Xiaohongshu's self-operated bonded warehouse in Shenzhen was put into operation. The area of ​​bonded warehouse ranks second among cross-border e-commerce companies in China.

In June 2015, during the anniversary celebration on June 6, Xiaohongshu APP ranked 4th in the overall ranking of Apple App Store and 2nd in the lifestyle ranking. The sales in the first 24 hours exceeded the sales of the whole month of May. The number of users reached 15 million.

In June 2015, Xiaohongshu reached a strategic cooperation with Japanese beauty website @Cosme, Japanese drugstore group Kirindo and Panasonic.

In July 2015, Shanghai Municipal Party Secretary Han Zheng visited Xiaohongshu and praised its rapid development;

In September 2015, Premier Li Keqiang visited Xiaohongshu and said, "Today's achievements are 30% due to innovation and 70% due to hard work."

On January 17, 2016, Tencent App Store officially released the 2015 "Star APP National List", and Xiaohongshu won the honor of the most breakthrough application of the year in the fashion shopping category.

In July 2016, Vice Premier Wang Yang visited Xiaohongshu's Shanghai headquarters and praised its development in recent years.

In the second half of 2016, Xiaohongshu expanded its third-party platforms and brand merchants, and the SKUs of all categories grew rapidly.

In May 2017, Redelivery's international logistics system was officially launched, supporting the query of complete international logistics chain information. Users can check which flight their products take to arrive in China.

In June 2017, Xiaohongshu held its third "66th Anniversary Sale", with sales exceeding 100 million in just 2 hours, ranking first in the Apple App Store shopping category. Xiaohongshu users exceeded 50 million

On May 31, 2018, Xiaohongshu released an internal letter announcing the completion of more than $300 million in financial financing, with the company's valuation exceeding $3 billion. This round of financing was led by Alibaba, and new and old investors including GSR Ventures, Tencent Investment, GGV Capital, Yuansheng Capital, Tiantu Investment, ZhenFund, and K11 Zheng Zhigang all participated in this round of financing.

In June 2018, Xiaohongshu’s first offline retail store, REDhome, opened in Shanghai

In October 2018, the number of Xiaohongshu users exceeded 150 million[130]; Xiaohongshu’s second offline experience store opened in Shanghai CITIC Pacific Wanda Plaza.

In November 2018, Xiaohongshu participated in the first China International Import Expo. [132] As a member of the Shanghai trade delegation, it worked with global brands to explore opportunities and new approaches in the young market.

In January 2019, Xiaohongshu’s users exceeded 200 million

On November 28, 2019, Xiaohongshu announced the launch of the Creator 123 Plan, which will launch a brand cooperation platform, a good product recommendation platform and an interactive live broadcast platform to help creators in three aspects: creator center, activities and products.

On January 15, 2020, Xiaohongshu's Creator Center was officially launched. Users with more than 5,000 followers, who have published 10 or more notes with more than 2,000 natural readings in the past 6 months and have no violations, can apply for access to the Creator Center in the APP.

On January 16, 2020, according to "Financial Graffiti", "Xiaohongshu closed all offline experience stores in Shanghai, and its online and offline linkage strategy encountered setbacks."