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After the e-commerce industry has gone through the stages of "more, faster, better, cheaper", "personalization" is bound to be the next key word. And through people, "personalization on a large scale" is where Xiaohongshu should make a difference.

Text | Zhang Peng
edit| Yan Fei, Zheng Xuan

At the end of last year, I had a conversation with Xiaohongshu COO Conan at the Geek Park Innovation Conference. When Conan talked about Xiaohongshu e-commerce, he frequently mentioned the word "native".

This means that Xiaohongshu has a clear goal, which is to become an e-commerce company that "grew" from the community and build its own "native business system."

There is no doubt that Xiaohongshu is the "traffic oasis" on the Chinese Internet today. In the past period of time, more merchants and consumers have flocked to Xiaohongshu. I saw a data that during this year's 618, the number of Xiaohongshu live broadcast rooms increased by 3.3 times year-on-year, the number of users who purchased in the live broadcast rooms reached 5.2 times that of the same period last year, and the number of 618 live broadcast orders was 5.4 times that of the same period last year.

However, if Xiaohongshu wants to truly become one of the "pillars" of China's Internet, the most critical issue is the "native business system" behind these data growths, that is, what are the differences between Xiaohongshu's user value and commercialization mechanism.

I estimate that at the "Xiaohongshu Link E-commerce Partner Conference" that Xiaohongshu is about to hold, I will see some more detailed progress than the last time Conan and I communicated, because I just saw Conan reveal a new definition that was not clear at the end of last year: Xiaohongshu e-commerce is "lifestyle e-commerce", which allows users to buy on Xiaohongshu, not only good products, but also a kind of desirable life.

I remember Conan told me similar details before. In the communication between the Xiaohongshu team and users, they kept hearing users say that what they bought on Xiaohongshu was not just a product, but also a lifestyle they longed for. This long-standing cognition was finally put forward as a definition this time.

Last year, I wrote about the strong contrast between Xiaohongshu’s confidence in “user value” and its lack of confidence in commercialization. In the past, Xiaohongshu has always tended not to “define” itself. I think the main reason is that it had not yet figured out clearly what its “characteristic path” was.

Now that the clear self-definition of "lifestyle e-commerce" has finally been put forward, it is worthwhile to discuss what Xiaohongshu's unique value will be in the big e-commerce track in the future.

01

E-commerce competition focuses on "more, faster, better, cheaper"

The key word after that is "personalization"

In the competition among traditional e-commerce platforms, "more, faster, better, cheaper" is a highly abstract concept of user needs, and is also the main goal of e-commerce in the past period of time to build a "more efficient system" among the three key elements of supply, demand and circulation.

Over the years, e-commerce platforms born in different eras have been looking for breakthroughs in "more, faster, better, and cheaper", magnifying them into their core value points, and thus finding their own competitiveness.

However, as the economic environment changes, oversupply has become the new background, and the competition among different e-commerce platforms around "more, faster, better, cheaper" is gradually converging, and everyone is completely involved. Today, in a "more efficient system", the most needed thing is to generate stronger pulling power on the demand side.

On the demand side"Massive personalization" is the eternal dream of any economic system, because it means that the needs of each individual do not need to be "merged, abstracted, and compatible", thereby maximizing demand.

However, "large-scale personalization" itself is a contradiction, because once personalized, the scale often cannot be increased. If the scale cannot be increased, the high costs of supply and circulation will cause the demand for "personalization" to be suppressed.

Today, many people are expecting that the "intelligent supply" of generative AI can stimulate higher circulation efficiency - AI can generate more product promotion materials that can attract users, and can also analyze user data more accurately to make good placements. But in unlocking more "personalized" needs, the problem that AIGC can solve is still a local efficiency problem, not a fundamental problem. This is why I think Xiaohongshu, as a fast-growing community, has the opportunity to release greater value in the e-commerce field.

The rapid rise of Xiaohongshu in the past few years can be said to be a sign that the "community value" has been rediscovered. As one of the oldest forms of Internet products, the community takes the content created by users as the core value of the platform and the ability of people to find their "same temperature" in the community as the core value of the community.

What’s interesting is that in the past, as a “content consumption platform”, community products had a very difficult time monetizing. But after e-commerce went through the journey of “more, faster, better, and cheaper”, everyone suddenly discovered that community e-commerce has tremendous potential in the highly “personalized” field of “lifestyle”.

My understanding of "lifestyle e-commerce" is that the competitive dimension of e-commerce has advanced from "more, faster, better, cheaper" to "more, faster, better, cheaper, and personalized."

For example, in Xiaohongshu, more and more merchants are targeting segmented groups and creating their own good business based on personalized needs. This is reflected in the platform's e-commerce ecosystem: there are many merchants and products in Xiaohongshu's e-commerce ecosystem that meet users' personalized needs.

I also heard Conan mention a data detail: in June 2024, "long-tail search terms" accounted for more than 60% of all search terms on Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu internally calls words with more than or equal to 8 characters "long-tail search terms". Using so many characters and such concrete expressions to search shows that the searcher's needs are already very personalized.

For example, in the past, users would search for broad keywords such as "running shoes for beginners", but now they will search for specific keywords such as "recommendations for cushioning running shoes with a pace of about 6 minutes", "children's running shoes for heavy weight and fat feet", etc. What they find is not just product shelves, but they also look forward to seeing real user sharing and experience, which will lead to more direct purchase decisions and consumption behaviors.

This reveals the path to achieve "personalization" on Xiaohongshu. Consumers' imagination and choice of diverse lifestyles have brought about personalized consumption needs, which in turn has given rise to a diverse supply of products rooted in different scenarios. In each Xiaohongshu live broadcast room, buyers or managers who have a unique understanding of life contribute their lifestyle proposals by carefully selecting, matching and presenting products.

There is no standard answer to lifestyle, which contains infinite possibilities. The core problem that Xiaohongshu wants to solve is how to make these personalities scalable.

02

Behind "personalization" is

People are reconstructing supply and circulation

From a philosophical perspective, "personality" exists as the opposite of "commonality", that is, "individual differences". It can be seen that "personalization" is highly dependent on the unique context of the "individual". If we want to talk about "personalization", we cannot do without each specific "person".

But what’s interesting is that the community is also a mechanism that reflects “individuality” and actively seeks “commonality”. Because if the community is large enough, the core need behind the individual’s individuality is often to find “resonance”.

This is precisely the opportunity of Xiaohongshu - the opportunity to rely on the personalization of "people" to change supply and circulation, and ultimately stimulate personalized demand on a large scale.

I remember that Xiaohongshu's CMO Zhiheng once said that the essence of Xiaohongshu's grass-planting lies in "people" rather than "traffic." This sentence points out a key concept of Xiaohongshu's e-commerce. For a long time, the transformation of the retail industry has been reconstructed around the three elements of "people, goods, and places", and the most fully developed and utilized are "goods" and "places." Consumers, as one of the key elements, "people", are often placed in the corner of "passively accepting" changes. Now,Xiaohongshu e-commerce has reconstructed this model, with "people" standing at its core and exerting decisive influence on "goods" and "places".

Not long ago, I heard an interesting example that shows how the "people" of Xiaohongshu e-commerce affect the "goods". A shoe manager in Chengdu, "Liu Ye", launched a "silent leather shoe", which sold nearly 500,000 yuan in more than ten days of live broadcast. This pair of leather shoes is mainly aimed at office workers in some specific work scenarios. They need to wear leather shoes at work, but the soles of general leather shoes are hard, and they make a lot of noise when walking in the office, which needs to be avoided in work scenes. "Liu Ye" discovered the personalized needs of this segment of the population and developed leather shoes with softer soles, focusing on the "silent" effect.

Product notes of Xiaohongshu blogger Liuye

There are many such interesting products and stories on Xiaohongshu. For example, there are large-size women's shoes and women's shoes with wide insteps for all foot shapes; there are sofas that can be used by pets and people; there are desktop home learning supplies specially designed for student dormitories.

All of this is inseparable from the core creation of "people": "People" dig out real personalized needs in specific scenarios and reversely transform them into new products, magnifying the personality of one person into the personality of a group, so as to achieve larger-scale personalization. Any small demand has the potential to make a good business.

Therefore, once "people" are injected into the core of the entire "people, goods, and places" model, Xiaohongshu's traffic and recommendation system can truly have "native value" - allowing the real needs that truly touch people's hearts to stand out, and continue to spread among similar people, thereby enabling "personalization" to achieve "scaled" commercial value.

In the process of scaling individuality on Xiaohongshu, "authenticity" is the most critical factor, because it can reduce the cost of trust and the cost of "lifestyle transfer".

For example, there is an interesting case on Xiaohongshu: Wang Wei, a clothing practitioner who has been deeply involved in the supply chain for more than 20 years, stepped out from behind the scenes and founded a brand WHICH on Xiaohongshu, which is specially designed for pear-shaped and slightly plump middle-aged women to match three-piece suits. She herself is a 40-year-old woman with a slightly plump figure. She knows all the pain points of this type of women in dressing. At the same time, she has the ability to express and the aesthetic sense, which can win the hearts of similar women in the live broadcast room.

Not only that, she also has a deep understanding of the supply chain. As the number of customers increases, she can reversely optimize her SKU model based on data, expanding the style from casual to workplace, home and other scenes. Although she only has more than 10,000 fans and has been doing it for half a year, it is said that she can now sell nearly 3 million per month.

Screenshot of the live broadcast room of WHICH brand manager Wang Wei

Wang Wei's story shows that on Xiaohongshu,"People" are the smallest unit of a brandThe brand's image and values ​​can be concentrated in the person who runs the brand; the interaction and experience between consumers and the brand can be shortened to the communication between consumers and the person who runs the brand.

Wang Wei once shared a detail. She said that when she exposed her belly and other users saw her slightly plump figure, her live broadcast room had greater fan stickiness. Users also jokingly told her that she didn’t need to lose weight, otherwise there would be no real "benchmark". Here, the manager becomes the first real user of the product and can tap into the intrinsic value of the product. This has changed the way brands build trust in the past, greatly improving the efficiency of the entire consumer decision-making process, and can even feed back to the upstream supply chain, improving the overall efficiency of product circulation.

This incident reminded me of what Conan explained to me last year about the "nativeness" of Xiaohongshu. Her answer at the time was "openness". On Xiaohongshu, Wang Wei can transform her imperfect figure into a trait, sincerely share her needs and solutions, and attract more people with similar personalized needs.

Because the products are derived from real needs, "people" present them with real effects, and users can also get a more realistic consumption experience.When a personalized way of life proposed by one person is amplified on a large scale through Xiaohongshu e-commerce and becomes the choice of more people, this forms the effective creation and efficient circulation of a "lifestyle", and the products are just "atoms that construct the lifestyle."

This is highly consistent with Xiaohongshu's "beautiful, diverse, and authentic" community ecology and its business values ​​of "sincere sharing and careful management." The core influence of "people" in Xiaohongshu's e-commerce is ultimately the power of "authenticity," and "authenticity" is the cornerstone of Xiaohongshu.

It can also be predicted that the real spokespersons for the products that sell well on Xiaohongshu should be users; the ones who sell well through live streaming are the real "peers" who are trusted in the community. The "buyer show" in Xiaohongshu's e-commerce ecosystem is truly promoting "lifestyle e-commerce" and creating new e-commerce value in "personalization".

Putting people at the center of e-commerce actually brings huge benefits.When the consumer sector is no longer about a few elite entrepreneurs and grand brand building, and no longer about competition in terms of investment skills and channel resources,Instead, there are thousands and thousands of buyers and even managers who can "scale personalization" through real personalized needs, thus forming countless "lifestyle convenience stores". This may be the greatest "native value" of Xiaohongshu.

I will be very curious about whether this new force will bring greater changes to the e-commerce field.

*Header image source: Visual China

This article is an original article from Geek Park. For reprinting, please contact Geek Jun on WeChat: geekparkGO

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