In most people's unconsciousness, the first wave of the 618 promotion this year has already passed two days.
Just like a conversation with a friend a few days ago about 520, when no one was posting lovey-dovey moments on social media, the friend commented, "Everyone will gradually realize that all festivals are traps of consumerism."
In recent years, consumers have become more "Buddhist" when it comes to shopping.
The cooling down of promotions is to some extent an irreversible trend. In the rapid development of e-commerce platforms over the past decade, "Double 11" and "618" have divided the market, and the "battle of the cats and dogs" has become synonymous with the annual promotions, with various gameplay, bundling deals, and consumption vouchers reaching unprecedented levels.
However, in recent years, as the e-commerce race becomes more crowded, whether it's Pinduoduo or Douyin going live every day for Double 11, for consumers, it's more worthwhile to check out the discounts in live streams than to study the complex rules of 618 and Double 11, and even be wary of whether merchants are raising prices before lowering them.
Although most consumers no longer want to play the "low-price game" with platforms and merchants on 618, for the platforms, as long as there is traffic, the cake still exists.
As long as there is traffic, they must keep going.
Various players are still in fierce competition
Although the heat of 618 has decreased, the fierce competition among various platforms continues.
As the first batch of players to start, Taobao, Tmall, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu all chose to kick off the first wave of promotions on May 20. By May 21, each platform had released their first-day sales reports for 618.
In the reports of each platform, the "opening sales" are the key words highlighted in red and bold. Tmall was the first to release its report: on the evening of May 20, within the first hour of sales, 28 brands had already exceeded a billion yuan in transactions, with 216 single products exceeding tens of millions in sales. In the digital 3C category, Apple's transaction amount exceeded 1.5 billion, while brands like Huawei, Xiaomi, and Vivo quickly reached billions in sales.
The transactions of 1497 overseas brands doubled, including 342 new brands. Within 4 hours of sales, Nintendo's transactions exceeded 120 million. In the imported goods category, there was a significant growth trend in categories like alcohol and cameras.
According to data from Taobao, 370,000 small merchants saw a more than 100% increase in sales on the first day compared to the same period last year. Industries such as trendy toys, jewelry, flowers, pets, and digital lifestyle, favored by young people, saw explosive sales.
As reported by Caijing, in Taobao's live streams, several top anchors including Li Jiaqi, Honey Surprise Society, and Wine Sister all achieved sales exceeding a billion yuan, with Wine Sister breaking a billion in just 43 minutes of streaming, setting an industry record.
Although JD.com announced that its 618 promotion would officially start on the evening of May 31, it also launched the "Heartbeat Shopping Season" on the evening of May 20. It seems that this activity will directly lead into the big promotion on May 31. At the same time, the platform has also launched promotions such as discounts and other mechanisms.
Pinduoduo took a clever approach by launching the "520 Promotion" on May 19, followed by the 618 promotion. From the Pinduoduo app homepage, it can be seen that the main focus has shifted to the 520 promotion voucher pack on the menu bar, along with a cross-store discount activity of spending 300 yuan and getting 50 yuan off.
It is worth noting that on Pinduoduo's 618 activity homepage, unlike other platforms during the promotion period, Pinduoduo focuses more on "official discounts" rather than emphasizing price reductions on products themselves. The banner section of its activity homepage directly states "Mid-Year Promotion, Low Prices Every Day."
For content platforms, it is obviously difficult to prominently feature "618" on the homepage like e-commerce platforms. Consumers who want to learn about Douyin and Xiaohongshu's 618 promotions will have a longer path to navigate.
It is reported that Douyin's Mall will officially start the 618 Good Things Festival on May 24. From May 24 to May 31 is the pre-sale period, and from June 1 to June 18 is the official period, avoiding direct competition for traffic marketing between platforms.
Although there is currently no promotion related to 618 on the Douyin Mall homepage, top influencers and some brand live streams, including Dongfang Zhenxuan and Pola, have already indicated "618 Good Things Festival" and "618 Early Purchase" in their live streams.
For Xiaohongshu, 618 is undoubtedly a "new student." Compared to Douyin's live streaming sales that have already penetrated consumers' minds, Xiaohongshu's live streaming only started to appear in the public eye in the past year. The current live streaming ecosystem is mainly led by top celebrity anchors like Zhang Xiaohui, Dong Jie, and Yi Nengjing, with other representative buyers as secondary support.
This year, store broadcasting has also become a key focus area for Xiaohongshu. However, if users want to understand the overall mechanism of Xiaohongshu's 618, they need to search for 618 in the search bar to enter the 618 venue, where the opening screen clearly indicates the representative special live streams every day from May 19 to June 1, with Zhang Xiaohui's special live stream on the first day, May 19.
PConline's drop-down activity page also discovered that, in addition to listing live rooms of some representative anchors for users, Xiaohongshu directly released a "618 Shopping Guide," selecting top anchors for the four major categories of clothing, food, daily essentials, and beauty products, and specifying the live broadcast times.
It is worth noting that although the 618 event page specifies the special session times of major headlining anchors, when clicking on some anchor pages on PConline, while the next live broadcast time is indicated, most do not have any mention of 618.
According to data from Xiaohongshu, the first-day live broadcast orders on Xiaohongshu that "exploded on the first day" were 8.2 times that of the same period last year, the first-day live broadcast GMV was 6 times that of the same period last year, the number of registered products was 2.8 times that of the same period last year, and the number of users purchasing in live rooms was 7.4 times that of the same period last year.
The number of store broadcasts going live is 3.8 times that of the same period last year, and the store broadcast GMV growth is 4.2 times that of the same period last year. Among them, Zhang Xiaohui's live transaction amount exceeded a billion again, and there were about 12 buyer live rooms that broke 1 million on the first day.
One fact is that when competitors flood into a track, "either-or" is the most direct and crude way to play. But in recent years, with the tightening of "anti-monopoly" regulation, platforms are finding it increasingly difficult to retain consumers, which is why we see the battle lines lengthening every year and the annual cries of "lowest price in history."
The "cat and dog war" ten years ago was about "low prices," and ten years later, it is still about "returning to low prices." "Actually, there are many price comparison platforms now, and what merchants call low prices are already transparent. I wanted to buy a pair of shoes on the 21st, but when you check the price trend, you will find that even with multiple coupons, the low price of some products is still on Singles' Day or even at other times, so what's the point of buying?" Some consumers told PConline.
For new players, the question now is whether to continue to "roll" in the so-called low prices or to try to break away from low prices and find a more differentiated and refined direction. Xiaohongshu is undoubtedly trying to provide the first "solution" to this question.
Xiaohongshu urgently needs a breakthrough
Whether it's the first cancellation of presales or users no longer needing various teaming up activities like "stacking cats," the biggest perceptible change that 618 brought to consumers this year is that the consumption chain has become simpler.
While all platforms are racking their brains on how to improve user experience, Xiaohongshu, which officially adopted the "buyer e-commerce" model only in August last year, took its first step into 618 from the merchant side.
A month ago, Xiaohongshu started a "618 High-Quality Growth" live week for merchants on how to achieve efficient conversion during 618. From categories like 3C electronics, home furnishings, beauty and personal care, and trendy clothing, they provided several 618 operational guides focusing on traffic trends, content distribution, search optimization, and more.
To fully support store broadcasts, Xiaohongshu announced at the "618 Grand Promotion Xiaohongshu E-commerce Partner Mobilization Meeting" that throughout the 618 period, they would provide a "triple upgrade" for live operations for merchants and buyers.
Firstly, there is an upgrade in support. For this 618, Xiaohongshu will provide 10 times the support resources, covering traffic resources including live broadcasts, notes, search, and the mall.
Secondly, there is an upgrade in live breathing lights. Live breathing lights refer to when a user scrolls through the feed, and an account's profile picture has a "red circle" indicating a "live" status. By clicking on the profile picture, users can directly enter the live room. It is noted that live breathing lights currently have the highest conversion rate for live broadcasts in Xiaohongshu merchant stores, serving as a strong tool for increasing viewership and one of the main sources of traffic for live rooms.
During the 618 promotion period, traffic from live breathing lights will double, guiding more users into live rooms.
The third aspect is incentive upgrades, providing richer incentive resources and platform subsidies for store broadcasts and personal shopper live streams, enhancing merchant exposure, and expanding the audience size for product recommendations.
Throughout its history, Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) has always been built around its user community. However, as the quantification of the value of user-generated product recommendations ("grass planting") begins and the subsequent purchase behavior ("grass pulling") naturally emerges, commercial value also starts to take root within the community. If the focus shifts to commercial operations, the needs of merchants will undoubtedly become a key focus for Xiaohongshu.
But how to strike a balance between content community and commercialization, how to cultivate good business within a good community, this is the constant question that runs through Xiaohongshu's construction of its own commercial system.
As Xiaohongshu's COO Conan once candidly admitted, when it comes to commerce, understanding the customers and needs of businesses, "I realize that Xiaohongshu's community is not just a platform for users, but also hosts many different merchants, products, brands, and individuals attached to it... We are starting to think about how to continue providing value to users while also helping these commercial values and entities."
"Because as the community grows, the commercial ecosystem it nurtures is constantly changing, with many new business opportunities and behaviors emerging. How to better build and iterate our commercial products in the process of continuous change and iteration in these two dimensions, productize which business needs and commercial values truly, and benefit more commercial entities. This is actually a challenge for us," Conan said.
"We also need to think about how to integrate these genuine business needs more organically into the community."
"Organic" is a keyword that Conan repeatedly mentions in explaining Xiaohongshu's path to commercialization.
Since 2019, "grass planting" has become a symbolic icon of Xiaohongshu, marking the beginning of its commercialization journey. This journey has taken four years. It wasn't until 2023 that Xiaohongshu truly began to enter the right track of commercialization, from fully opening up "note-taking for product sales," integrating e-commerce and live streaming businesses, to launching personal shopper e-commerce, and more.
Just as it took 10 years for Xiaohongshu to define the core of its e-commerce story at the company level: personal shoppers. To some extent, Xiaohongshu's commercialization is not entirely guided by human intervention; search has brought out many commercial needs and values for Xiaohongshu. How to build the chain of commercial products, Conan's answer is "adaptation."
"Adapt to user needs and the chain, adapt to the rhythm and rules of ecological growth, build Xiaohongshu's native commercial system to help commercial roles create value. This is the only way for business to better integrate into the community." E-commerce is more organically placed within the community, such as product notes, live streaming for product sales, and more.
This is something we never thought of. In today's highly competitive e-commerce arena, Xiaohongshu can still carve out its own path to commercialization with Dong Jie and Zhang Xiaohui.
Since the end of last year, with the proposal of the solution "planting within the platform, pulling across the ecosystem," Xiaohongshu's commercial ambitions have shifted from the early stages of brand promotion to the later stages of brand marketing.
When it comes to merchants, perhaps nothing is more convincing than data. Data shows that in April 2024, the number of merchants starting e-commerce live streams on Xiaohongshu increased fivefold compared to April last year, the number of users purchasing through store broadcasts increased twelvefold, and the number of merchants with monthly sales exceeding one million increased by 7.4 times.
Xiaohongshu is moving fast, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but how to truly equip the personal shopper ecosystem with the ability to span long cycles is Xiaohongshu's next "solution."
