Xiaohongshu’s innovation:
1. Community model e-commerce platform
Xiaohongshu started with the community. At first, users focused on sharing their overseas shopping experiences in the community, and the feedback from real users helped Xiaohongshu gradually establish its own brand, reputation and characteristics. More and more users have made this community bigger and bigger, and the accumulated overseas shopping-related data has also increased. These data can provide more relevant information and more choices for interested users. At the same time, the existence of the like and collection mechanism can help the platform push out more useful and popular notes faster, so as to present them to relevant users. Xiaohongshu can also use these data to accurately analyze user needs and ensure that its self-operated products are highly respected by users.
2. Adopting the bonded warehouse storage model
Bonded warehouse storage of goods effectively improves the delivery speed, shortens the logistics time, enables the goods to reach consumers faster, and improves the customer experience. In addition, the consolidated transportation model launched by Xiaohongshu saves transportation costs. Bonded warehouse storage also eliminates some links of traditional sales warehouses, thereby saving the manpower and material costs of warehouses. At the same time, since the standardization of the bonded area tax payment system, bonded warehouse goods have avoided the legal costs of tax evasion, reducing some risks for e-commerce platforms such as Xiaohongshu.
3. Accurately cut into the pain point of cross-border e-commerce-information asymmetry
Xiaohongshu produces website content through a community model, breaking the asymmetry of information on cross-border consumer goods, helping “foreign good things” to spread word of mouth within the platform, and establishing strong ties between potential users. With Xiaohongshu’s self-operated model, users can easily buy the products they are interested in. In the traditional Taobao or JD model, users are accustomed to buying first and then posting orders, and pay more attention to the user’s shopping experience, but cross-border e-commerce such as Xiaohongshu pays more attention to consumers buying genuine products after they have a more detailed understanding of the product and a more objective multi-party usage impression.
As a new B2C cross-border e-commerce platform, Xiaohongshu explores the defects of the market, directly hits the pain points, creates an e-commerce platform that truly caters to consumer needs, and leads the industry to continue to develop.