The closure of Xiaohongshu’s self-operated e-commerce business a while ago attracted a lot of attention. It can be said that Xiaohongshu, which celebrates its tenth anniversary, has finally turned its back on its self-operated e-commerce business.

Here’s what happened. On HE Tuber September 4, Xiaohongshu’s self-operated e-commerce platform “Little Oasis” issued a farewell letter, announcing that it would cease operations on October 1 and officially close on October 31. Once "Little Oasis" is closed, Xiaohongshu's self-operated e-commerce business will only be its "Welfare Club".

Unexpectedly, ten days later, Xiaohongshu "Welfare Club" also began to issue a farewell letter on September 15, stating that the welfare club would stop selling products on October 16 and officially close on November 16.

"Welfare Club" can be said to be the source of Xiaohongshu's e-commerce business. It was first derived from users' demand for "links". Many Xiaohongshu e-commerce users placed their first order in "Welfare Club" .

The closure of both "Little Oasis" and "Welfare Club" means that Xiaohongshu's past self-operated e-commerce strategy has failed, and Xiaohongshu e-commerce needs to re-explore the road to e-commerce. From offline to online malls, from online malls to "one-store-in-one", from "one-store-in-one" to a small oasis, Xiaohongshu's e-commerce exploration path is extremely tortuous. After trying various paths, it still remains the same. The results were meager.

Although the Xiaohongshu community has a reputation for "growing grass", today, when China's e-commerce infrastructure is extremely mature, it has always been difficult for Xiaohongshu to enter the transaction link. The behavior path of a large number of users is to plant grass on Xiaohongshu and compare prices on Taobao. Therefore, Xiaohongshu has never been able to build a closed loop of "planting grass and pulling grass", so it is difficult to form a mature business model.

In the field of e-commerce in China, I think there are almost no opportunities for vertical e-commerce platforms. Vertical e-commerce will eventually be covered by Taotian and JD.com. If Xiaohongshu wants to be an e-commerce company, it cannot expect to only operate in a certain community. Highly popular vertical categories (such as beauty, second-hand luxury products, etc.). Therefore, if Xiaohongshu wants to do well in e-commerce, it must carry out model innovation at the element level of the so-called "people and goods store".

In the past few years, Douyin has carved its way through live streaming e-commerce, and Pinduoduo has grown through WeChat social dividends and "consumption downgrade". Xiaohongshu needs to find a new e-commerce model to gain a firm foothold in the e-commerce platform. , and frankly speaking, Xiaohongshu has not found its direction now.

At the end of August, Xiaohongshu shouted the slogan "The era of buyers has come" at an official event, and established the route of "buyer e-commerce", saying that it would concentrate resources and strength to serve more buyers and owners. managers, businesses and brands.

Xiaohongshu doesn’t have as much traffic as Douyin and Kuaishou, and it doesn’t have as good a supply chain as Taotian and JD.com. It doesn’t touch either end and is very passive in the e-commerce field. The so-called "buyer e-commerce" is not original. At present, it is just a concept, and it is still far away from truly opening up the business model.

In fact, I have heard the story of "hand-made e-commerce" many times in other second-tier e-commerce platforms, such as Vipshop. A large number of buyer positions have been set up in various places, but Vipshop’s presence in the current Internet e-commerce platform is extremely low. Just from the perspective of product category attributes, Xiaohongshu and Vipshop are somewhat similar.

According to Xiaohongshu COO Conan, "In Xiaohongshu, the core of a buyer is to serve users well and connect good products." However, looking at it this way, the role of the so-called "buyer" is still vague. Why are buyers It is even more unclear whether it will be sticky to the Xiaohongshu platform.

In my opinion, the number of so-called "buyers" in the fashion industry is extremely scarce. Not everyone can have the same product insights as Zhang Xiaohui, so Xiaohongshu definitely does not mean what the public thinks. Therefore, Xiaohongshu’s so-called “buyer e-commerce” may ultimately be a variant of traditional internet celebrity community e-commerce.

E-commerce is a business that emphasizes operations, but there are various conflicts between e-commerce operations and community content operations. I even think that the closure of Xiaohongshu’s self-operated e-commerce is actually being cheated by the content operations of its own platform. , resulting in a directional error in the self-operated e-commerce category.

We once pointed out in the article "Little Red Book Has Broken the Hearts of This New Generation of Consumer Entrepreneurs" that Little Red Book has promoted the emergence of a large number of "trends" in the past few years, such as camping, Frisbees, small appliances, and bistros. Waiting for new consumer products, now the bubbles of these categories have burst and returned to the niche, and most of Xiaohongshu’s annual new consumer trends have been falsified.

The reason behind this is that Xiaohongshu is a social display platform. Although Xiaohongshu has repeatedly emphasized the authenticity of its platform content, negative public opinions about Internet celebrities showing off their wealth and exaggeration have always been surrounding Xiaohongshu, because Xiaohongshu, as a The representative of exquisite life and consumption upgrade is actually a content vanity fair, and users’ sharing and display are more or less motivated by vanity.

Therefore, Xiaohongshu’s platform content is very likely to be out of touch with mass consumption needs. For example, camping is an activity. Normal people can infer from common sense and logic that it will be a niche activity in China for a long time, rather than mass leisure consumption. need.

In order to demonstrate the influence of its own platform on consumer trends, Xiaohongshu will encourage and strengthen the production of camping and other niche content in terms of platform content operations, thereby forming a content bubble and attracting a large number of entrepreneurs and capital, resulting in The new consumption illusion. But after the bubble burst, people discovered that a large number of Internet celebrity products were just fake demand.

Talking back to Xiaohongshu’s self-operated e-commerce, the closure of the “Little Oasis” and “Welfare Club” businesses is closely related to the above logic.

"Little Oasis" was born at the end of 2021. It first focused on comprehensive categories such as beauty and skin care. However, it later discovered that the number of notes related to urban sports such as camping on the platform had skyrocketed. "Little Oasis" then adjusted to the sports category, focusing on camping, road running, Skiing, cycling, hiking and other sports scenes.

This is a case of one’s own people cheating one’s own people. Activities such as camping are themselves new consumption bubbles promoted by the content operation strategy of the Xiaohongshu platform. It is obviously a mistake for “Little Oasis” to focus on consumer needs such as camping.

Some media found that "Little Oasis" only has 9 products with sales exceeding 1,000 in the two categories of camping and urban sports. In the farewell letter of "Little Oasis", the official admitted that it "failed to achieve the expected goal of maximizing everyone's outdoor needs", but in fact this was caused by a wrong direction.