With less than a week to go before the pre-sale of 618, the e-commerce industry welcomes new variables.
On May 7, Taobao Tmall signed a strategic cooperation with Xiaohongshu and released the "Red Cat Plan", announcing that the two sides will further open up and integrate and open up the whole link from planting grass to purchasing.
"Xiaohongshu can jump directly to Taotian", many e-commerce people shouted. Obviously, the further deepening of the cooperation between the above two platforms is also to a certain extent to prepare for the outbreak of the 618 promotion. However, can this marriage really solve the growth anxiety of the two platforms?
The two leading e-commerce companies have a strong cooperation
Xiaohongshu helps Taobao and Tmall "sell goods"
It is understood that this cooperation has realized for the first time the whole link from Xiaohongshu grass planting to Taotian consumption transformation. The Red Cat plan launched by Taotian and Xiaohongshu mainly includes two aspects: first, the product link is hung under the Xiaohongshu note, which can directly jump to Taotian's store; Second, Taotian and Xiaohongshu jointly build a third-party account, so that merchants can gradually optimize their strategies and improve the efficiency of advertising through the whole process of consumers seeing content on Xiaohongshu and placing orders on Taotian, as well as observing full-link data in the background.
What is the significance of Taobao Tmall and Xiaohongshu joining forces at this time?
Some Xiaohongshu operation service providers said that the Red Cat plan is to combine Taotian's e-commerce management capabilities with Xiaohongshu's content planting advantages, open up the whole link from "grass planting→ interaction → transformation", and improve brand marketing efficiency.
The CEO of a company engaged in online marketing analyzed: "Xiaohongshu is using Taotian to open up the closed loop, Xiaohongshu directly jumps to Taotian, and user purchase actions are tracked. This is a closed loop of conversion data, which means that the brand's content on Xiaohongshu is not only exposed, but also can measure ROI. ”
Another brand said: "Planting grass direct products will attract traffic to Taotian, and the data is linked to ROI and scale after transparency, if Xiaohongshu has a good effect, then we will consider investing more in Xiaohongshu." ”
Previously, after consumers "planted grass" in Xiaohongshu, they needed to manually open Taotian or other platforms, search for products and place orders, and there was a break between planting grass and placing an order. This used to be an important gap in Xiaohongshu's business closed-loop - the brand's advertising, bloggers' content output, and users' "planting" were all completed in Xiaohongshu, but the final transaction was on other e-commerce platforms. The "Red Cat Project" connects these two actions, and to a certain extent, fills the gap in Xiaohongshu.
As a veteran shelf e-commerce, Taotian lacks the link of "content planting". Its strength lies in its abundant merchant resources, supply chain construction and "transaction" mentality, but traffic anxiety is also the reality it faces. Douyin started to engage in shopping malls early, and while "video planting", it directly harvested core users and made a lot of money.
Through the Red Cat program, Taotian can direct Xiaohongshu's high-quality customers to its own stores and help merchants achieve growth. Access to Xiaohongshu is undoubtedly a key step for Taotian to seek a breakthrough in the stock market, and the trade-off of Ali is not only to keep the cake in front of him, but also to make the cake bigger.
To put it simply, the depth of this cooperation exceeds the advertising at the traffic level, because it covers the entire grass planting chain, so it will change grass planting from a marketing method to a deterministic business product, effectively driving the growth of more brand merchants.
However, it is worth noting that not all Taotian merchants have joined this cooperation, and only some brands are currently piloting. According to Xiaohongshu, at present, only advertising notes on Xiaohongshu can add Taotian's product links, not all. Neither Taotian nor Xiaohongshu announced how many brands would join the pilot.
Xiaohongshu's chief operating officer, Conan, believes that brands are being challenged in today's business environment, falling into pure large-scale advertising and one-way reach with thick lines in inertia. Xiaohongshu will give full play to its advantages in stimulating demand and expanding targeted audiences, and support more brands to achieve full-link operation from content planting to transaction conversion, and complete further growth.
A new inflection point for e-commerce platforms
Taotian Xiaohongshu "shakes hands" again
In fact, based on the rapid development of Xiaohongshu in recent years, Taotian began to explore the "grass planting" cooperation with Xiaohongshu as early as two years ago, and scientifically measured the drainage value of "grass planting" through "Little Red Star".
According to the data, in 2024, the scale of "Little Red Star" will grow rapidly, the click-through rate of Taotian brand merchants in Xiaohongshu will increase by 20%, the interaction rate will increase by 109%, the average daily number of merchants participating in Taotian Liantou will increase by 335% year-on-year, the store entry rate of brand merchants in the sports industry will increase by 85% year-on-year, and the store entry rate of brand merchants in the beauty industry will increase by 41.5% year-on-year.
In addition, according to the official data released by Xiaohongshu on May 7, Xiaohongshu will have 300 million monthly active users in 2024, 120 million times a day for users to take screenshots on the notes page, and more than 6 million requests for "links" in the comment area of posts every day.
Based on the high growth of the above data, Taotian Strategy and Xiaohongshu announced that they will further open up and integrate, use Xiaohongshu's external ecology to feed the activity of Taotian station, and achieve the spiral growth of "off-site customer acquisition, on-site retention, and global repurchase".
In the past, the relationship between Xiaohongshu and e-commerce platforms was quite delicate. In 2018, Taobao's "Good Things Review Group" section once displayed reviews with the Xiaohongshu logo, which was regarded by many industry insiders as the prototype of the initial contact between the two. By the time of "Double 11" in 2020, some media reported that Xiaohongshu opened the Taobao link of notes in internal testing, and there were certain requirements for bloggers to use this function.
Only one year later, in August 2021, Xiaohongshu began to close the external link permissions for products in the delivery notes, including Xiaohongshu Mall and Taotian product links, and the external link function of live streaming remained unchanged. After cutting off the external link, Xiaohongshu accelerated the construction of its own e-commerce closed loop and accelerated the promotion of the "integrated mechanism of number and store".
However, the relationship between the two has begun to warm up since 2022. Between Xiaohongshu and Taobao, the data monitoring and analysis tool Xiaohongxing can be used, and merchants can see the planting and conversion effect of Xiaohongshu notes through data.
Before this year's "618", the cooperation between the above two platforms has been further accelerated. Xiaohongshu exchanges "openness" for "survival", and Taotian exchanges "energy" for "increment", which is also to a certain extent to prepare for the outbreak of the big promotion. Compared with Douyin, Xiaohongshu is more likely to form a positive cycle of "planting-decision-repurchase" with a more harmonious community atmosphere, which will further divert Douyin's high-value users. Taotian and Xiaohongshu have joined forces, and Douyin's e-commerce growth may face greater pressure.
However, the above-mentioned people believe that the challenges of this cooperation should not be ignored. External link redirection may interrupt the user's browsing rhythm, and the platform needs to reduce the churn rate by optimizing the jump speed and page adaptability. In addition, the current function is limited to advertising, which is difficult for small and medium-sized businesses to benefit, and if the full content is opened in the future, it may lead to a contradiction between a surge in traffic and an increase in operating costs.
Upgrade the global operation
E-commerce ecological reshaping
After "tearing down the wall", everything is just beginning.
Platforms can no longer rely on monopolies to retain users, and will have to go deeper. Nowadays, the "volume" of e-commerce is deeply bound by traffic algorithms, and Taotian is no exception: volume live broadcast, volume GMV, volume various "artificial festivals".
The Red Cat Project is actually a signal that content platforms (such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin) and shelf e-commerce (such as Taobao, Tmall, and JD.com) may increasingly "work hand in hand" to carry out global operations.
Global operation has also become an important part of Taotian's growth strategy. Jia Luo, President of Tmall, said, "The cooperation with Xiaohongshu is a very important step for Taotian's global operation in 2025." Following the interoperability cooperation with WeChat Pay and JD Logistics in 2024, Taotian has established cooperation with more than 200 Internet platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, Alipay, Bilibili, Zhihu, etc., to attract traffic for merchants and do global operations.
As early as March this year, at the 2025 Tmall Super Brand Private Sharing Conference, Jia Luo bluntly said that "Tmall's focus this year is to do growth". Among them, one of the key points of Tmall's investment is off-site traffic. Jialuo made it clear that this year it will strengthen cooperation with social media such as Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili to facilitate the global operation of the brand and Tmall, and eventually guide users to Tmall for transactions.
One of the clear directions of Xiaohongshu's commercialization business is also to move towards greater openness in the ecosystem. Xiaohongshu will strengthen its positioning as a "traffic hub", dominate traffic allocation rights through cross-platform data exchange, and evolve to "content as transaction entrance".
The fierce competition between cutting-edge beauty, time-honored brands and international brands has made the competition for crowd assets the main battlefield for brands. The importance of grass planting for beauty brands has further increased, and brands need to reach out to a large area of grass planting, continuous and in-depth operation transformation, and continue to reach after conversion in order to generate repeat purchases. At present, for brands/merchants, it means that they must also learn to "operate globally": do content planting and building brand image in Xiaohongshu, and do transaction transformation and supply chain fulfillment in Taotian, forming a closed loop of "content-transaction".
Liu Run, the founder of Runmi Consulting, made a vivid analogy: the flow of "public domain" is like tap water, and the one with the highest price gets the paid water; The "private domain" is like well water, it is expensive to drill a well, but the water is free. In the era of global operation, enterprises should not only "drill wells" and build effective private domains, but also form effective connections between public domain traffic, public domain stores, private domain user pools, and private domain stores, so as to achieve seamless connection and interoperability of comprehensive customer flow, information flow, and service flow, so as to optimize user transactions and experience, and maximize brand management efficiency. In the context of the fading of traffic dividends and the surge in costs, global operation has also become the key for enterprises to find increments and change "traffic" to "retention".
The e-commerce industry is always changing, and online e-commerce has been settled in the overall situation, and Douyin and Pinduoduo have come out again. Today, Taotian and Xiaohongshu have joined forces, and the global operation is in full swing. The battlefield of the e-commerce industry is shifting from "who has more products" to "who understands users better". At the moment when the flow dividend is ebbing, efficiency is more important than increment, and ecology is more valuable than exclusivity. Therefore, in this case, brands that understand users are bound to win more opportunities.