Xiaohongshu product experience analysis report: product planning and prospects!

Xiaohongshu is currently in the product growth stage and has a good momentum of development. During this period, it is necessary to grasp the different characteristics of content e-commerce and transaction e-commerce in guiding user purchasing behaviors, as well as the verticalization, crowd concentration, and scenario-based characteristics after consumption upgrades, and make plans.

1. Experience Information

Product name: Little Red Book

Experienced by: Shelly

Version number: Android 4.5.110

Hardware environment:MIUI V7.3

2. Product Description

2.1 Industry Analysis

Through a simple review, we can summarize the commodity purchase channels into three stages based on the changes in people's purchasing behavior, purchase channels, and evaluation methods:

Judging from the current situation, the status of traditional transaction-based e-commerce has been somewhat challenged in the era of mobile Internet , and the e-commerce model has gradually transitioned from birds of a feather flock together to people of a feather flock together. At the same time, people's consumption behaviors have changed. With the improvement of daily living standards, people pay more attention to whether the items they buy are suitable for themselves, and screen the purchased goods based on the characteristics of the people for whom the products are suitable. At the same time, purchasing time is fragmented, and users are accustomed to shopping in their fragmented free time. They hope to be able to choose suitable products and pay for them on delivery in a short period of time. Such changes have also created a trend of verticalization and scenario-based consumption after upgrading.

From a macro perspective, the current adjustment of the national tax rate policy has led to different impacts on e-commerce companies with different supply models. The supply chain has fluctuated and changed, bringing about certain scale and model adjustments to the industry.

The above is the changing trend of user activity on e-commerce shopping guide platforms in recent times. It can be seen that after the tax rate adjustment in April, the user activity of e-commerce shopping guide platforms fluctuated for a certain period of time, but after the market adjusted freely to adapt to the changes, it began to return to convergence.

From a micro perspective, the main influencing factors are buyers and suppliers.

Buyer:

1. Although China's economic growth trend is slowing down, it is still in the growth stage. As users' consumption levels rise, the items they purchase are no longer limited to basic usage needs. The status of expected needs continues to rise, and the requirements for the quality of the goods they hope to obtain continue to increase.
2. Users tend to buy overseas products with better value for money and higher quality.
3. The trends of scenario-based, group-based and time-fragmented purchasing behavior are deepening.

Supplier:

At present, the forms of e-commerce platforms are mainly divided into the following models: C2C, B2C, BBC, M2C, etc.

2.2 Product Overview

SLOGAN: Xiaohongshu, find good things from all over the world

Positioning: A cross-border e-commerce platform based on UGC+traffic model.

Advantages:

• The user base accumulated by the former women's community has formed a user scale. At the same time, the stickiness between users is higher than that of traditional transaction-based e-commerce, and the inflow and outflow traffic is large.
• The high-quality content of notes in the community has laid the foundation for content e-commerce, attracting a large number of users who have a desire to buy but whose cognitive closure needs are not met. In addition, user retention is high and the stay time is long.
• The star effect, using stars such as Hu Ge as spokespersons, attracted the attention of young user groups.

2.3 Demand Analysis

The analysis is mainly based on changes in the product itself and the external environment, collectively referred to as external demand and internal demand highlights.

External demand - e-commerce industry:

1. The rise of cross-border e-commerce. In their daily shopping, people prefer to buy cost-effective, high-quality overseas products, but currently there are few channels for overseas shopping and the experience is poor.

• Poor purchasing experience: few product types, high prices, and uncertain authenticity
• Poor logistics experience: Usually the delivery and transportation time costs are high, and the waiting time is long

2. The need for cognitive closure of traditional e-commerce. When making purchases on traditional transaction-based e-commerce platforms, numerous products will appear based on the user's keywords. The user must rationally consider multiple factors and jointly evaluate the products, which makes it impossible to achieve a clear goal and sometimes causes confusion.

3. Traditional e-commerce is not adaptable to the crowd-oriented, scenario-oriented, and vertical trends brought about by consumption upgrades

Internal demand - products:

1. The product has accumulated a user base and a foundation for content e-commerce, laying the foundation for transformation. When users share notes, they need to know the purchase channels and purchase information.
2. Re-creation of community commercial value

2.4 User portraits and usage scenarios

User Tags:

Conclusion: The user group is mainly students and white-collar workers living in first-tier developed cities.

Features: High commercial value. This target group has strong purchasing power and can afford higher-priced, high-quality goods. They also have a strong willingness to purchase high-end goods.

Regional analysis chart:

Population distribution chart:

Use scenarios:

1. Weak purpose and random browsing: Users browse products randomly in their spare time without any purchase target or direction, such as on the way to work, during lunch break, or when going home from get off work. At this time, the advantages of content e-commerce are highlighted, which can guide users with content and provide directional guidance, thus transforming into the second usage scenario.
2. Strong purpose and special browsing: users browse corresponding products according to their own goals. The content of the notes will give users psychological hints, strengthen their emotional thinking, and at this time, users make a single evaluation, and content such as the price-performance ratio of the product is considered less.
3. Passive browsing: A friend initiates a group purchase, and the user browses the information to decide whether to participate.

3. Product Analysis

3.1 Product Architecture

As can be seen from the above picture, the main functions of Xiaohongshu are:

Basic functional modules:

• Personal account, settings
• Product Information
• Cart
• Settlement
• Message Notification

Desired features:

• notes
• Socialize and interact
• Welfare Specials
• Wishlist
• Album recommendation
• Logistics Information

Excitatory function:

• Personalized recommendations
• Image editing function when writing notes
• Purchase information barrage

The core modules are : discovery and shopping. The former establishes a UGC community to divert traffic to the latter, promote users' emotional thinking, and induce purchasing behavior.

The main task is: discover products of interest -> evaluate -> purchase -> review -> other users browse them, which is a closed-loop process with strong sustainability.

The product’s keywords: connection, exclusivity and discovery, well embody the characteristics of content e-commerce and community e-commerce.

• Connection: Connect users, content, and users and content to increase user stickiness and loyalty
• Discovery: Discover all the good stuff and interested users, and let users know the high-quality content resources within the product.
• Exclusive: Push personalized preferences to users, create products that are exclusive to individual users, and strengthen the concept of caring

4 Functional Walkthrough

Function 1: Login and Registration

You must log in to enter the Xiaohongshu page

Experience:

• Mobile phone quick login means mobile phone quick registration. It is not allowed to send verification code more than 3 times within 1 minute, and the fault tolerance is low;
• As can be seen from the chart, since it is aimed at domestic users, the use of domestic mainstream social third-party login and mobile phone quick login can make the user login steps faster and simpler, increase user stickiness, and optimize the experience
• Disadvantages: Login required to browse content will cause user loss

Improvement suggestions:

• Optimize mobile phone quick login and registration, enhance fault tolerance measures, and consider special situations such as weak user network and misoperation
• Conduct AB testing to compare the impact of allowing users to browse the homepage without logging in and the current situation on core indicators and data acquisition, and decide whether to continue with the current approach or revise the version.

Function 2: Discovery

Method 1: Personalized recommendation on the homepage

The home page will grab tags and make corresponding content recommendations based on the tags that the user has selected as of interest.

Experience:

• A search entry has been added to the homepage, allowing users to easily filter content on the homepage, but this is inconsistent with the personalized recommendation feature of the page.
• Information is presented in a waterfall flow, with abundant content but no regular or logical ordering.
• The entrance for posting notes is not placed in the right place, and does not guide users well.

This page is mainly used to display product-specific keywords, but the current solution is not particularly ideal. First, the content that appears is less consistent with the tags that users are interested in; second, the information presented to users is rather messy, and the content is not well divided according to tags. All the content is mixed together and difficult to distinguish. When browsing, users cannot view it according to their one-way needs; third, the content dimension is low and the information aggregation is insufficient.

Improvement suggestions:

• Optimize users' browsing experience for recommended content, and segment users' different viewing methods based on scenarios
• Recommended content is strategically designed to enhance the logic of the content. Recommended rankings are based on certain rules, such as: the order of recommendations is adjusted based on user browsing behavior
• The recommended content dimension has been upgraded and information aggregation has been enhanced. It is no longer just a single note content, but can also add user albums formed by operational organization.

Method 2: Users browse and search independently

1. Multi-dimensional information

Content direction:

• Recommended high-quality operation topics
• Fresh note content
• Hot Topic Content
• Item label classification
• Global location label classification
• Popular albums

2. Search

• It has a search association function, which can associate keywords to facilitate user search.
• Search categories to improve search accuracy
• When searching for notes, popular content is recommended, helping users with unclear search purposes to find the direction
• The search results are related tags and corresponding search topic content

Users can segment search results according to their search goals, and due to filtering, information is more vertical when browsing.

Experience:

• High information aggregation and multiple dimensions
• The information content is high-quality. The notes include the purchase information of the product and the user's experience of using it.
• The independence of the quality life label classification is not strong, and there are many overlaps between them.

Improvement suggestions:

• According to McKinsey MECE thinking, reduce the coherence of quality life label classification
• In terms of information provision, you can conduct user research and allow users to conduct open card classification and optimize according to user habits.
• The search form has been upgraded. It is no longer just a single text search, but also includes QR code, voice and other forms.

Function 3 Notes

1. Take notes

The entrance to take notes is on the home page and the Me page, which is relatively hidden.

Note-taking process:

Experience:

• In the process, photos cannot be imported and edited all at once. They must be processed one at a time and then returned to be imported again. The process cycle is too high.
• The entrance is not obvious and users cannot easily perceive it.
• The photo editing function gives you a sense of excitement with label editing

Throughout the note-taking process, the picture editing effect is very interesting. Users can add filters, labels, stickers and other content. The editing operation is convenient, and the labels take users into consideration, directly giving the added title content, saving users time to think. However, only one photo can be added at a time, and the rest of the time you need to go back and add it again, which reduces the continuity of the entire process and increases the repetition.

Improvement suggestions:

• Optimize the process, increase the number of photos that can be imported at one time, and enable batch operations
• The location of the note-writing entrance has been changed to a more prominent place

2. Browse your notes

• Users can directly browse the graphic note information, note author, comments and related recommended note content
• While browsing, you can comment, collect, share, like, follow the author, and browse other notes.
• Only the latest three comments are displayed
• There are two special ways to share note details: WeChat snapshot and Moments snapshot. The background captures valid information, packages it, and generates standard pictures for sharing and publishing.

Function 4 Product Purchase

• It has a bullet screen function to remind users browsing the product of the latest purchase information
• Price limit countdown function, prompting the original price and the remaining discount time
• Product introduction, relatively brief
• If the product is not paid for within 30 minutes after being added to the shopping cart, it will be automatically removed from the shopping cart
• Too few product categories

Experience:

Xiaohongshu uses multiple information to guide users, such as product purchase information barrage and shopping cart countdown. These enable users to transform from rational thinking driven by emotions to emotional thinking, so that they can purchase and settle as quickly as possible. However, there are too few product types and low SKUs, so users are unable to purchase the products they want, which is slightly weak compared to the powerful note content.

Function 5 Connection

• Xiaohongshu users can follow each other, or users can follow tags and topics of interest; have user fans
• After users allow Xiaohongshu to access their address book, they can see the updates of friends in their address book who have opened Xiaohongshu accounts and can follow them.
• Xiaohongshu allows users to comment and interact in note details

Users can interact and follow each other through the UGC community, and automatically form groups based on their own preferences. At the same time, within this group, there will be behaviors such as sharing with each other and actively browsing the notes of the users they follow. People can better understand what they really need and stimulate their desire to shop.

5 Product Interaction

First level page:

Problem:

• Inconsistent TAB interaction logic: Clicking the Home page, Discovery TAB, and Message TAB can refresh and return to the top, but clicking the Purchase TAB cannot perform the corresponding operation
• The purchase page adopts the method of returning to the top by clicking the top button after the waterfall flow appears; although the existence of the top button can well prompt users to operate, it will block information when browsing the information flow . In this block, the function guidance should be strengthened, and then a reasonable method should be selected to modify it
• There is no priority for function guides, and all of them disappear only after the user clicks on them.
• I cannot change the mailing address information on my page
• Personalized recommendation homepage cannot be classified according to attention tags

advantage:

• Improved the ICON click effect of each page, and the effect transition is natural
• Lively interactive animation

Second level page:

Problem:

There is no direct return to top interaction in the note details

6 Product UI

The product's main color is red, which is suitable for young people and echoes Xiaohongshu. The overall interface is clean and concise, and the key design points are cute, fresh and flat.

7. Competitive product analysis

According to Porter's five forces analysis:

Alternative competitors: Bantang, What’s Worth Buying, Kaola.com, Life, and GiftTalk

Potential competitors: Taobao, Douban

Here, based on the model characteristics and DAU, Kaola.com and What’s Worth Buying are selected as competing products for analysis.

Comparative analysis of basic properties:

Feature analysis

Xiaohongshu: Community Function

Xiaohongshu’s predecessor was a community, so it has strong attributes of content e-commerce. It excels in terms of high-quality community content, strong shopping guide attributes, and higher user stickiness than Koala. Koala's UGC content has not yet started, and the content tends to be operational recommendations.

Koala Shopping: Special Offers

Kaola.com sets up special sales as a separate page, emphasizing its importance and strategic position. It launched limited-time mobile phone purchases and exclusive mobile phone services to enter the mobile Internet market and create a price advantage. At the same time, it directly cooperated with brand owners and adopted a direct purchase and self-operated model to increase SKU. At the same time, the coordination of logistics chain and supply chain processes gained a certain degree of pricing autonomy, which attracted users to a certain extent.

Data Analysis [Data from iResearch]

DAU scale

Xiaohongshu's DAU user scale ranks first among the TOP10, significantly suppressing the second-ranked Kaola.com, with a range of nearly 700,000 users. This is due to Xiaohongshu's community function and its obvious user DAU advantage.

Order conversion rate

During the 6.18 promotion, Koala's order conversion rate continued to increase, and the conversion rate remained above 15%, showing a strong momentum. At the same time, Xiaohongshu's order conversion rate remained basically flat during this period, maintaining at around 7.7%. The order conversion rate was low, and the difference with Kaola was more than 7 percentage points. Considering that Xiaohongshu's DAU is significantly higher than that of Kaola, it is speculated that the reason is that Xiaohongshu's community attributes are too strong, its e-commerce attributes are relatively weak, and its SKU is relatively low.

Exclusive user ratio

Xiaohongshu: 86.4% Kaola: 92.4% Difference: 6%

Xiaohongshu has accumulated a large number of users by relying on high-quality notes in the UGC community and has gained a group of loyal fans. Kaola has established its own brand image through price advantages and product reputation, and its exclusive user share continues to increase.

User retention rate

Here we mainly focus on weekly retention and daily retention:

Kaola's daily retention rate is 4 percentage points higher than Xiaohongshu's on average, and its weekly retention rate is 3 percentage points higher on average, which is a very obvious difference.

The retention rates of both are relatively good, which can be attributed to the high-quality content that attracts users and the establishment of a points system that further improves the results.

8. Analysis and Summary

Xiaohongshu has currently accumulated a large number of users, and has the advantages of user base and user stickiness, with high user retention and long retention time. However, from the order conversion rate, we can see that the attributes of the community are always stronger than the characteristics of e-commerce, and people's awareness of purchasing on Xiaohongshu has not been well guided. At the same time, the supply chain, logistics chain, and capital chain all need to be further strengthened. Although the content of the notes is good, the SKU is low, and users can no longer find purchase information of the products on the Xiaohongshu platform, which will reduce the user's desire to buy on Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu is currently in the product growth stage and has a good momentum of development. During this period, it is necessary to grasp the different characteristics of content e-commerce and transaction e-commerce in guiding user purchasing behaviors, as well as the verticalization, crowd concentration, and scenario-based characteristics after consumption upgrades to make plans. Here are the things the product is going to do:

Select KOLs in society

Currently, the hot spots in the e-commerce industry are focused on beauty, maternal and child care, etc. Products should grasp the current consumer preferences, respond quickly, and design solutions.

Increase retention and repurchase rate

Further build a points system or establish a user growth curve, with the core indicators being daily and weekly user retention

Optimize supply chain and enhance channel capabilities

Whether the product partners and their own positioning model are sustainable, controllable and suitable for the purchasing habits of target users.

Exclusive keywords are further reflected in product design

Further use the obtained user data and information to conduct analysis and push information to individuals