Xiaohongshu and Tmall’s “Red Cat Plan” has attracted widespread attention. This cooperation not only allows users to go from planting grass to purchasing with one click, but also opens up the background data of both parties, providing brands and merchants with more accurate marketing tools. However, this move has also raised many questions: Does Xiaohongshu return to the old path of opening up external links? How will its own e-commerce business develop?
Just before 618, Xiaohongshu and Tmall announced a major event and jointly launched the “Red Cat Plan”.
At the heart of this plan are two points:
First, the grass planted by users in Xiaohongshu can jump to the Tmall store to pull weeds with one click, without having to search on Tmall again.
The second is that Tmall merchants advertise on Xiaohongshu, and the effect can be directly seen to avoid spending money indiscriminately.
To put it simply, there are a few fewer turns between “seeing” and “buying”. Xiaohongshu’s notes can be directly linked to Tmall products, and the background data of both sides is also opened, so that the advertising effect is no longer “metaphysics”.
What does a product manager need to do?
In the process of a product from scratch, it is not easy to do a good job in the role of product manager, in addition to the well-known writing requirements, writing requirements, writing requirements, there are many things to do. The product manager is not what you think, but will only ask you for trouble, make a request:
View details >
Before 618, brand merchants finally waited for a “certainty” about traffic, conversions and growth. But this cooperation, two questions also followed: Xiaohongshu has been adjusted several times in the “external link” policy, this time is it a return to the old path or a new balance? As a content community focusing on “lifestyle e-commerce”, after opening external links, will Xiaohongshu’s own e-commerce business be affected?
What kind of results the “Red Cat Plan” can achieve remains to be verified by the next data.
Xiaohongshu and Tmall each take what they need
On May 7, Xiaohongshu and Tmall jointly launched the “Red Cat Plan”.
In simple terms,That is, merchants and brands can “hang links” under Xiaohongshu’s grass planting notes (graphics and videos), and users will jump directly to the corresponding Tmall store after clicking.This feature is called “grass planting direct”.
Renderings of “Grass Planting Direct”
It is understood that the hanging chain purchase has been opened to the first phase of customers for testing, and in May, it will open cooperation to industries such as FMCG (such as beauty and personal care), sports and outdoor and health, and will continue to be open to more brand merchants in the future. At present, the cooperation is limited to Tmall merchants, and Taobao C store is not supported for the time being.
Before the 618 node, the cooperation between Xiaohongshu and Tmall was generally interpreted by the industry as “each taking what they need”.
For Xiaohongshu, this external link is regarded as improving the efficiency of commercialization (i.e., advertising) and attracting more Tmall brand merchants.
After all, Xiaohongshu has been deeply bound to the mentality of “planting grass” – brands and merchants use Xiaohongshu as an important marketing position, and users also use Xiaohongshu to assist themselves in consumption decisions.
The huge user demand became the basis for this cooperation. A set of data shows that Xiaohongshu has more than 300 million monthly active users, 70% of Xiaohongshu monthly active users have the habit of active searching, more than 120 million user notes intercept every day, the number of users seeking purchase suggestions per month is as high as 170 million, and the number of comments “asking for links” in notes is as high as 80 million, double that of two or three years ago.
Some industry insiders told “Fixed-Focus One” that even if there is no official cooperation, the grass planting notes of many brands and merchants will be diverted to the stores of Taotian and other e-commerce platforms.
For Tmall, the cooperation is expected to bring new traffic and boost the performance growth of core categories.
Traditional e-commerce platforms have experienced traffic bottlenecks in the past two years, purchasing a large amount of traffic from outside every year, and presenting an extensive and homogeneous operation for traffic – “321 link”. Taotian has also been trying to make short video content and in-depth grass planting on the site in the past, but the effect has yet to be verified.
According to media reports, the highest priority strategy of Alibaba’s e-commerce business group this year is “growth”, and subsequent organizational and strategic adjustments will revolve around it. At present, Alibaba has taken the lead in launching a growth campaign in the three core industries of clothing, beauty, and sports and outdoors. The categories represented by these three industries are not only Taotian’s advantageous categories, but also the categories that the “Red Cat Plan” took the lead in testing the waters.
It is worth noting that unlike Xiaohongshu’s previous attempts to briefly open external links, there is a big change this time, that is, the two sides have opened up the background data.
For merchants and service providers, a question that is always difficult to verify is: Is the money invested in Xiaohongshu effective? How many conversions and transactions have been made?
This cooperation will open up Xiaohongshu’s note data such as clicks, reading, comments, likes, collections, sharing and following, as well as Tmall’s transaction data such as entering the store, searching for the store, and adding purchase transactions.
This makes it easier for merchants to track the full-link data of users from “Xiaohongshu Grass Planting – Tmall Transactions”, so as to optimize the delivery strategy and improve the deterministic effect.
However, some service providers said that although this cooperation is more open, the current product categories are limited to beauty and personal care, sports and outdoor, and health. At the same time, there are also certain requirements for store qualifications, such as the need to have a Tmall store and the comprehensive experience score of the store is ≥ 4.5, and the daily budget ≥ 5,000 yuan.
In other words, there is still a certain threshold for merchants and brands to participate in this event.Some analysts believe that this cooperation is more conducive to Tmall brands.
Although “grass planting direct” is still in the pilot stage, it reflects that Xiaohongshu and Tmall hope to establish a closer closed-loop path between brand marketing and e-commerce conversion to further improve their competitiveness.
“Open an external link”, follow the old path or evolve again?
The key to this cooperation is that an old problem has been put back on the table – “external links”.
It is related to Xiaohongshu’s commercialization (advertising) business, which has always been Xiaohongshu’s main source of revenue. Some media reported that the revenue once accounted for 80% of Xiaohongshu’s overall revenue.
This model is based on Xiaohongshu’s long-term accumulation of “grass planting” mentality: for example, users want to see real sharing on Xiaohongshu, and if they can’t find a certain brand’s grass planting post, they may place an order because of the grass planting post of another brand in the same category. Therefore, brands and merchants are taking the initiative to place on Xiaohongshu more and more.
It is precisely because of this trend that after 2019, Xiaohongshu began to vigorously develop its advertising business. In 2020, the proportion of advertising investment on the Xiaohongshu platform will increase significantly, becoming a new marketing position for brands.
Looking back on the past, Xiaohongshu’s attitude towards external links has wavered.
On the eve of Double 11 in 2020, in order to further increase advertising revenue, the platform opened external links for the first time, and Xiaohongshu’s internal testing supported reporting cooperation notes to jump to Taobao links. However, less than a year of cooperation, at the end of July 2021, Xiaohongshu cut off the external link of the note and launched the “number store integration” to encourage brands and merchants to complete the self-closing loop within the platform by operating their own account content.
Xiaohongshu’s adjustment of the external link policy seems to be “repeated”, but in fact it is answering a problem that all content communities have to face – how to balance commercialization and user experience.We do not want the business atmosphere to affect users’ trust in the platform’s content, nor do we want to limit the brand’s willingness to deliver and marketing efficiency.
Xiaohongshu’s strategy in the past few years is actually to find a balance between the two:
On the one hand, the external link is broken, and on the other hand, the cooperation between Xiaohongshu and external platforms has not been suspended.
In 2022, Xiaohongshu began to build systematic product capabilities around “grass planting” to optimize its advertising effectiveness.
Also in this year, Xiaohongshu and Taobao Tmall tried to cooperate with Taobao Tmall to jointly launch “Little Red Star”, which is responsible for monitoring the spillover data of grass planting, mainly related to users’ grass planting behavior on Xiaohongshu (such as reading, liking, commenting) and monitoring the UV (unique visitor) data related to Tao stores brought by Xiaohongshu experts planting grass. By 2024, in addition to Taobao, Xiaohongshu will also cooperate with JD.com and Vipshop to launch similar products such as Xiaohongmeng and Xiaohonglian.
This “Red Cat Plan” can be seen as a step forward on the basis of the Little Red Star project.
Among them, “grass planting direct” is data exchange based on the principle of “CID delivery”.CID is a unique identifier generated when users click on Xiaohongshu ads, which is used to track the next transaction behavior that occurs on the e-commerce platform after the user sees the advertisement, and measures the effectiveness of the advertisement, such as clicks, conversion rates, etc. This helps advertisers optimize their advertising strategies and improve the ROI of their ads.
It can be simply understood that this cooperation has gradually transformed Xiaohongshu’s “grass planting” from an abstract concept in the past to a quantifiable one. However, some merchants have certain concerns about how far their background data can be opened up and what the actual effect is.
In addition, the opening rhythm of this plan also shows Xiaohongshu’s caution – not only the selection of categories is biased towards standard products, but also sets restrictions on the brand access threshold. This may mean that Xiaohongshu still wants to keep the opening of external links within control.
Is it impacting Xiaohongshu e-commerce?
Outside of the “Red Cat Project”, another unavoidable question is:What about Xiaohongshu’s own e-commerce business?
In the past two years, Xiaohongshu has vigorously supported the platform’s self-operated e-commerce system around the “integration of number stores”. Whether it is “blogger trailers”, on-site search optimization, or resource tilts towards buyer stores and store broadcasts, the logic is to try to keep the link from content to transaction within the platform.
This logic is internally called “closed-loop grass planting” and is the core of Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce strategy. But now the outside world also has questions, will this cooperation with Tmall allow users to directly trade on Tmall, will it affect Xiaohongshu’s transaction conversion on the station?
In fact, Xiaohongshu’s advertising and e-commerce are two paths of parallel development.
First, the categories currently open to external links are FMCG (such as beauty and personal care), sports and outdoor, and big health. The categories of cooperation and opening are biased standard products, industries with many KA merchants, these are Tmall’s advantageous categories, and the two parties cooperate, and Xiaohongshu mainly obtains business share through traffic advertising.
At the same time, Xiaohongshu still has advantages in categories such as clothing, home furnishings, mothers and babies, and designer brands that pay more attention to content guidance and personalized expression. It is difficult for these brands to compete with big merchants in terms of investment and budget on traditional e-commerce platforms, but they can rely on the Xiaohongshu platform, which focuses on “lifestyle e-commerce”, to tap the new needs of crowd segmentation and personalization, and build their own positions while raising GMV.
For example, Xiaohongshu manager “Ten Yuan Nimei” creates around women’s daily life (such as underwear troubles, lying flat moments, fitness pressure), and has a strong emotional resonance with many users. At first, she didn’t know that Xiaohongshu could open a store, so she settled on other platforms first. But soon she found that Xiaohongshu’s recommendations were more accurate, and the match between users and content was very high; Compared with shelf e-commerce, it is easier to precipitate fans and rely less on traffic. Now, she has devoted her main energy to Xiaohongshu.
SecondWhile opening external links, Xiaohongshu is still accelerating the construction of its own e-commerce ecosystem.In July 2024, Xiaohongshu clarified its positioning as a “lifestyle e-commerce”, and that year, the number of new merchants entering Xiaohongshu increased by 8.1 times, the number of merchants with annual sales exceeding 100 million increased by 3.3 times, and the number of merchants with annual sales of 50 million increased by 4.6 times.
Xiaohongshu is also constantly upgrading its on-site trading tools, such as the launch of the “Comment Area Blue Chain” function this year, allowing users and merchants to embed product links in any note comment area, and click to directly jump to the Xiaohongshu store to place an order. These product links can be products in Xiaohongshu merchants’ own stores, or users and buyers sharing their “planted” or purchased products.
The store with the blue chain jumping
According to the data, as of the end of April this year, more than 60,000 “blue chains” were posted in the comment area every day. The brand exposure brought about by this cooperation with Tmall has also prompted many merchants to drain traffic through the blue chain and turn the popularity of cooperation into their own growth opportunities.
Third, the growth of Xiaohongshu’s overseas users provides potential synergies for Taobao to expand the global market, and also brings more imagination to Xiaohongshu e-commerce’s own overseas market layout.
Xiaohongshu released the “E-commerce Overseas Pilot Plan” this year, which covers the United States, Hong Kong and Macau in the first phase, providing full-link services such as online transactions, trade exports, payments, and localized operations.
Although the partnership is still in the pilot stage, it remains to be seen whether the brand can achieve improvements in grass planting efficiency and quality. But what is certain is that Xiaohongshu will not only be satisfied with the role of “planting grass”, it is also expanding its own business imagination space.
