8000-word long article | A comprehensive interpretation of Xiaohongshu's "professional account"

02. The mall and the store are two-in-one, and the integration of account and store is fully implemented

In 2014, Xiaohongshu officially started its e-commerce journey. In the early days, it was called Welfare Club for cross-border e-commerce. Later, as the advantages of cross-border e-commerce were no longer there, it gradually turned to content e-commerce. The e-commerce product was also renamed "Xiaohongshu Mall" and opened to brands, which is equivalent to the "Tmall" in Xiaohongshu.

However, Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce journey has not been smooth, nor has it brought Xiaohongshu hope of commercial success, so the Xiaohongshu Mall has always existed, but it has never been the “main force” of the platform.

With the revision on August 2, Xiaohongshu Mall will become history. This time, Xiaohongshu will connect the original Xiaohongshu Mall and the original personal potato store system, collectively referred to as "Xiaohongshu Store".

As we all know, there are obvious differences between the previous Xiaohongshu Mall and the potato shop.

A typical Xiaohongshu mall has public domain traffic. For example, you can search for related products being sold in the mall on Xiaohongshu.

However, the potato shop will only be displayed on the personal pages of bloggers and companies and will not be searched on the platform, which will lead to more conversion of private domain traffic.

Secondly, Xiaohongshu Mall also has more complete professional tool support for promotion, marketing, customer service, etc., but the previous potato stores had almost no tool support.

So we understand that Shudian is a simplified, low-profile version of the Xiaohongshu store.

But after August 2, will the Xiaohongshu store continue the previous potato store model? What are the features of the future Xiaohongshu stores? What should be done with the previous Xiaohongshu Mall?

I believe everyone must be full of questions. Don’t worry, let’s continue reading.

1. 0 threshold: After August 2, on Xiaohongshu, individuals or companies can quickly open a store, abolishing the previous basic condition of 1,000 fans to open a store, truly realizing 0 threshold. But the prerequisite is that you must first have a "professional account". However, we all know that professional accounts for interest identities do not require any information to be reviewed, so it can be equivalent to a zero threshold.

But does it mean that any product can be sold? What do you want to sell? Same as Xianyu?

The answer is no. Xiaohongshu still hopes that the products and brands that can be sold are compliant, so the products must pass the review before they can be put on the shelves.

Therefore, the Xiaohongshu platform will ensure that the products provided to users are genuine and regular. If users encounter problematic products, the platform will actively pay compensation in accordance with laws and regulations.

2. Reduced commission: After August 2, Xiaohongshu stores will change the platform commission rate to 0 commission for monthly sales below 10,000 yuan, and 5% commission for sales above 10,000 yuan. Compared with the previous potato stores, this is undoubtedly a good thing, and for previous Xiaohongshu mall users, it can be regarded as a major benefit!

3. Fast settlement: In the past, Xiaohongshushu stores and shopping malls mostly settled on a monthly basis, but after August 2, Xiaohongshushu stores will be uniformly upgraded to T+7 settlement. This is good news for small and medium-sized businesses. What small and medium-sized businesses care most about is the flow of cash. Monthly advance payments have become a pain for many brands, but T+7 can more or less give everyone some relief.

Through the above three points, everyone can clearly see that the characteristics of Xiaohongshu stores are significantly different from the past.

Secondly, there have been obvious changes in the Xiaohongshu store model. First, the professional account and the store need to be bound, the personal homepage will directly display the store entrance, and the merchant’s personal page and the store are combined into one.

In the past, the Xiaohongshu account and store could be separated. For example, you could just open a store without creating an account. But after the revision, the store and the account are inevitably bound to each other. Without an account, there would be no store.

So after the revision, the first thing Xiaohongshu users see is the account rather than the store, so what the account looks like and what content is shared becomes more important, and the brand content or IP has been placed in the position of core strategy.

The significance of doing this is to meet the needs of users in the new era. Like the traditional product details page in the past, users can only see the product introduction, but it is actually difficult to feel the brand's tone and it is difficult to perceive the feedback from real users of the brand. By using the form of seeing the professional account first, users first see the content released by the brand, then see the product, and finally see the product details page. This can effectively improve the purchasing methods and conversion rates of Generation Z people.

Traditional link: Product-Product details page-Purchase

New link: Content-Product-Product Details Page-Purchase

It can be seen that the traditional link itself does not have the ability to market or market consumer decision-making content.

But if it is in the form of a new link, users will first enter the professional account through @brand name. Regardless of whether the product is finally sold, the brand concept and brand image will be remembered by consumers. This is a very important thing for new brands.

The purpose of Xiaohongshu doing this is still to influence users' consumption decisions through brand or personal content and convert it into sales for Xiaohongshu stores.

This model, in which a professional account identity allows one to open a store with a low threshold and the account and store cannot be separated, is called "account and store integration" by Xiaohongshu.

This is also the core strategy of Xiaohongshu to place new hope on the transaction system, hoping to meet the commercial demands of brands and individual merchants on Xiaohongshu.

Under the new Xiaohongshu store model, previous Xiaohongshu mall brands can freely choose to continue to perform their previous mall contracts, or they can choose to implement the new Xiaohongshu store plan.

If the deposit previously deposited on Xiaohongshu exceeds the deposit that should be deposited now, Xiaohongshu will also arrange a refund.

To query the margin status of special categories, you can copy this link to open:

https://school.xiaohongshu.com/rule/detail/5d69348b00000000000000000/5d6f36a161f779001d98e381

I think it's worth listening to the official sharing first:

Jess, head of Xiaohongshu’s open platform and e-commerce, said:

Last year, Xiaohongshu’s main strategy on the transaction side was to promote Xiaohongshu live streaming sales. With the help of bloggers, many merchants saw sales growth on Xiaohongshu. But after doing this, I found several problems: First, the brands that KOLs serve are probably still mainly big brands, because only big brands have the budget to pay for their slot fees and commissions, which makes it impossible for small and medium-sized brands to participate in the game.

Second, in terms of anchors bringing in goods, unlike other platforms where anchors broadcast daily, Xiaohongshu broadcasts weekly, and there will not be a lot of repetition in a short period of time. That is, some brands find anchors to sell products, but daily sales cannot be achieved through live broadcasts.

Third, for merchants, the relationship with the anchor is a cooperation, but they only get sales volume, not user assets and user sedimentation. In other words, they just do a business, but other than that, there is no value, and they do not retain their own private domain.

Based on this situation, I think live streaming sales is more about helping merchants find their potential users and do some cold start-ups, but this is a short-term or early-stage thing. But what should this early stage stuff look like in the later stages? Apart from bloggers promoting products, brands, especially small and medium-sized brands, do not have the money to place advertisements or to find bloggers for brand cooperation. What can they do? You can accumulate fans by yourself and make conversions in your private domain. Therefore, live streaming is very important for the content creation of small and medium-sized businesses, allowing B-end brands to face the C-end directly. In addition to this model, we have also created another model, from the original B2K2C, to the connection between B and C. This is a big background, and we have made such a strategy.

Secondly, we also have a vision, which is to accompany every sincere business individual to grow on Xiaohongshu, where they are born from content and grow in transactions. Because many brands grew up and were born on Xiaohongshu. There is no new brand that will not be planted on Xiaohongshu. But originally, only a part of them were born, and we did not help them too much. Now we hope to help everyone to do transactions. So they are born and grow, born from content and grow from transactions.

So based on what Jess said, Xiaohongshu is still making adjustments based on user needs. This time the needs are not only from ordinary users, but also from more small and medium-sized businesses on the platform.

Because I work in the self-media industry of Xiaohongshu, I can deeply feel that the "brands" on Xiaohongshu are somewhat different.

In the past, the brands we defined were standardized product brands and big brands. These brands do exist in Xiaohongshu, but you have to know that they are not all of the brands in Xiaohongshu.

At least nearly half of the brands are not actually “brands” in our definition.

Because they may just be an individual selling things, such as selling their own paintings, selling their own paid knowledge and so on.

They are more personalized, more non-standard, more difficult to define, and even difficult to replicate.

In our opinion, it is difficult for such small businesses to bring in a lot of capital transactions, and they cannot become a mature brand immediately, but this is the current situation in the Xiaohongshu ecosystem.

Existence is reasonable.

Although Xiaohongshu has not expressed it explicitly in the past, we seem to be able to see that Xiaohongshu rejects such small brands, because they can hardly use effective commercial products. The only way to acquire customers is by publishing their own content, but this may involve the content not being of high quality or the advertising being restricted.

But the current Xiaohongshu seems to be ready to take on this kind of "existence is reasonable". Since it cannot give up, it might as well try to penetrate the "special merchants" that other platforms do not have.

The budget of a big brand may be equal to that of dozens of small businesses. Although there are more small businesses, the cost of service is also higher. This is also a dialectical thinking. Should we keep 100 big brands or have 1,000 small brands?

It is difficult to say whether this is a good business model or not. It is difficult to say whether this is a business model that can further commercialize Xiaohongshu. We can only wait and see the results in the future.

1. Encourage @accounts

Users were encouraged to @ the brand’s professional account. Xiaohongshu is actually a platform for promoting products and sharing lifestyles. Many users naturally post about the things they like and buy on it. In the past, people usually didn’t know where to buy after seeing the products, so they would ask in the comment section where to buy. However, users didn’t dare to say it because it would be considered an advertisement.

Therefore, users all opened a certain orange software by tacit understanding.

Now Xiaohongshu hopes to shorten the conversion link between users and brands.

Users are directly directed to the brand through the @account. Of course, the brand should also have its own store, so the transaction is completed. It can even become the merchant's private traffic. This closed loop does not jump to other platforms, but is actually completely within Xiaohongshu.

Will this @ be treated as an advertisement? The answer is no.

@It is not an advertising action in itself, but the basis for judging whether it is advertising content is still: whether the content is based on real experience and sharing with scenarios.

2. Add product tags to notes and return them to store products

On August 2, Xiaohongshu cancelled the card for promoting products in notes. So how can we quickly guide users to purchase in notes? By jumping to the account homepage through @account, users can go to the Xiaohongshu store to browse the products one by one and compare which one they just saw.

This is obviously unscientific.

Therefore, Xiaohongshu removed the product promotion cards, but added product tags.

As a merchant, you can mark your products in the content, and users can jump to the product purchase page after clicking.

But it should be noted here that only users who have opened a store can use the product marking function. Users who are not in the store opening state can only mark the location & user name.

3. Statement of interest applies to your own notes flowing back to the product

It is impossible to sell goods without recommending your own products. Whether the recommendation is considered advertising or not still depends on the community convention: the basis for judging whether it is advertising content is whether the content is based on real experience and sharing with scenarios.

But there is a way to avoid being misjudged.

It has been made clear that the interest declaration method is applicable to the entire Xiaohongshu community. As long as the advertisement is in the form of compliant non-cash benefits, it can be avoided from being treated as an advertisement through the form of interest declaration.

And still get the distribution of organic traffic.

The above is the recommended link gameplay after August 2nd. Other things not mentioned remain the same as before.

It is worth noting that the form of "cooperation with xx brand" shown in the previous reporting notes may also undergo some changes simultaneously. I will publish a separate article to talk about brand cooperation later, so I will not go into details in this article.