What is RED? China’s Most Trusted Social Shopping Platform

China’s e-commerce industry is predicted to be worth $1.8 trillion Yuan by 2022, and a large chunk of this growth is expected to come from the luxury fashion and goods market.

Established in 2013, founded by Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu with the main headquarter based in Shanghai, China. XiaoHongShu has grown to become China’s foremost fashion, beauty, and luxury shopping platform with over 300 million registered users and 85 million monthly active users as of July 2019.

However, RED didn’t start out as a shopping platform at all. Rather, it first started as a small online community for Gen Z or Millennials to share their shopping experience and product reviews, like Instagram and Pinterest combined but with a sprinkle of Taobao.

Unlike other e-commerce platforms that are sales-centric like eBay and Amazon, XiaoHongShu focuses on a unique blend of trusted user-generated content, community building, and word of mouth advertising.

This mix of social commerce has proven to be a huge hit especially for young Chinese women as 86.9% of the users on the app are female. Over 3 billion posts are also created daily via a wide variety of media, including photos, texts, and short videos. These touch on all areas of lifestyle, such as cosmetics and beauty, fashion, food, travel, entertainment, reading, fitness, and childcare.

Throughout the years, the app has evolved to include e-commerce functions as they host over 10,000 third-party e-commerce merchants and offer more than 100,000 different products. With their artificial intelligence and machine learning, RED tailors content recommendations to individual users, incubating new consumer trends and more than 20,000 brands such as SK-II (112k followers) and Gucci (116k followers) have created community accounts on the platform.

Now, RED has become the pioneer of a new business model, one based on social commerce fueled by authentic user reviews, threatening other Chinese e-commerce giants like Taobao. 

So here comes the billion dollar question. How can your business thrive on RED? Well, you will have to stay tuned till next week as we help you walkthrough on exactly how to grow your business on RED.