Lifestyle e-commerce allows users to purchase not only quality products but also a desirable lifestyle on Little Red Book.

Is this a dream or the truth? Read on to find out.

- Introduction

01

Little Red Book, Here I Come!

Seriously, no kidding, I've started a food account on Little Red Book.

It's already registered as 'Hu Zhe's Food Planet,' Little Red Book ID: 5047322012.

This doesn't mean I'm abandoning 'Talking Nonsense into Sense,' of course, I'll keep it up. But I want to challenge my limits in a more enjoyable way.

This statement isn't contradictory.

By limits, I mean combining technology and food, and improving both the quality and frequency of content.

By the most enjoyable way, I mean doing what I love to counter the fatigue of pushing my limits.

I've been writing about IT, the internet, and AI for over 20 years, but I've had a 40-year experience with food culture.

Around 1972, a magazine called 'China Food' (formerly known as 'Food Technology') was published. My grandfather's family loved food, so they subscribed to this food magazine. They not only reread it often but also bound each year's issues together into a bound volume.

When I learned to read at three or four years old, my grandfather's house already had seven or eight thick volumes of 'China Food,' which became my first reading material. Over the 17-18 years before I left for college, I read each issue over 100 times. This was my earliest and deepest foundation in food culture, igniting my passion for it.

I asked all my friends, "When do you think I'm the cutest?"

They all said, "When you're eating and casually sharing food culture and anecdotes while we're buried in our meals. You crush us with your food knowledge, turning a meal into a lesson."

Clearly, my greatest joy in food is sharing, which is also my greatest joy in life.

I asked many people where I should share my food knowledge.

Everyone, regardless of gender, unanimously said, "Only on Little Red Book. Sharing food is one of your favorite lifestyles, and Little Red Book is the best place to showcase it."

Years ago, I wrote an article comparing Little Red Book to a city that can accommodate hundreds of millions of young people. Here, tags are like neighborhood names, gathering highly engaged communities around specific content, creating frequent social interactions. It's like having your own place in a favorite neighborhood with great neighbors, making you want to stay for decades.

In her famous book 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities,' Jane Jacobs introduced the concept of neighborhood supervision. She believed mature communities are the safest because neighbors have normal interactions and a strong sense of identity. She advocated for small blocks and street-level shops to increase face-to-face encounters, enhancing street safety. This echoes Little Red Book's city-like structure.

Just as I was eager to join Little Red Book, a sudden announcement made me hesitate. Little Red Book had once again announced its commercialization progress, this time aiming for 'lifestyle e-commerce.'

Would this disrupt my quest for a pleasant lifestyle?

02

Lifestyle E-commerce: Little Red Book's Differentiated Choice

Little Red Book currently faces an imbalance between user activity, traffic, and commercial monetization results.

Traffic is just a prerequisite for earning money. It's like having a river but not harnessing its power until dams like Gezhouba and Three Gorges are built.

Little Red Book has taken detours in commercialization over the years. Only since last year, with a focus on buyer specialists and live streaming e-commerce, has it changed outsiders' perceptions of its e-commerce business.

The secret is that Little Red Book's founding team understands what it can and cannot do.

Within Little Red Book, 'maintaining community atmosphere' is always top priority. If something tempting violates this rule, it's automatically rejected.

You can't fault these guardians of community values. Without them, Little Red Book wouldn't have steadfastly pursued its lifestyle content community path, attracting hundreds of millions of users and monthly active users, becoming known as 'the last rich mine of internet traffic.'

Yet, balancing community and commercialization is inherently contradictory.

For instance, a community builder might see an empty lot and envision a beautiful lawn, while a commercializer would immediately think of erecting a billboard and renting it out.

After years of trials and errors, I believe Little Red Book has realized that to balance community atmosphere and commercialization, it must empower its residents.

When you're both a resident and a merchant, you naturally maintain the balance between community and commercialization, self-regulating more effectively.

This experiment has begun with the first batch of 'buyer specialists,' residents who shop based on their interests, share their experiences, and gradually become consumer influencers in specific fields. Now, with Little Red Book's full-chain solution from browsing notes and live streams to checkout, they help users find good products based on their expertise and user needs, closing the loop between material consumption and spiritual satisfaction.

Maggienotes, once a pure image-text blogger, said, "I used to visit beautiful places and take photos. Receiving likes was satisfying enough."

But she didn't care much about fans' shopping needs.

Since becoming a buyer specialist, she's more interested in listening and sharing her taste and aesthetics, finding it incredibly fulfilling.

Within a year, her followers grew from 90,000 to 190,000, account income nearly sextupled, and brand collaboration offers quintupled.

I was intrigued. I want to do this too!

Slightly different from buyer specialists are 'curators.'

While buyer specialists are the basic commercial units, curators are more specialized, Insight demand and provide products based on lifestyle, essentially running businesses within the community.

For example, Zhou Qi, a fashion curator, transitioned to Little Red Book in 2023, sharing versatile outfit ideas through notes, live streams, and curation. She offers one garment with at least three to five different styling options, applying and explaining them in contextual scenarios. She also develops products based on user feedback and demands, starting her business on Little Red Book.

We can see buyer specialists as basic units, curators as their advanced versions, and above them, larger organizational structures with more direct and manageable supply chains.

Delegating commercialization to community residents and letting lifestyle e-commerce grow organically within the platform is Little Red Book's unique approach to monetization.

03

Carving Out Market Share and High Monetization Rate

Let's analyze how 'lifestyle e-commerce' aligns with Little Red Book's commercialization strategy.

I believe four dimensions support this differentiated positioning.

First, redefining niche markets is the sharpest weapon for carving out existing market share.

Most agree that China's e-commerce market is increasingly saturated.

According to Xinmao Rank, Alibaba's 2023 GMV was 7,185.4 billion yuan, Pinduoduo's was 404.51 billion, JD.com's was 353.94 billion, Douyin E-commerce's was 220 billion, and Kuaishou E-commerce's was 119.47 billion. The top five compete in this market, with an entry threshold of 1 trillion GMV.

Among the top five, there are essentially two types: platform-based and content-based.

An e-commerce mogul once told me that redefining niche markets is the best way to carve out existing market share.

Imagine the top five e-commerce players in one market. You build a mall next to it, offering a unique shopping experience. Consumers who prefer this new experience will flock to it, choosing Little Red Book's 'lifestyle e-commerce,' which combines content e-commerce and mindset-driven e-commerce, proposing a 'lifestyle-based consumption' ideology. The high proportion of female and young users further empowers this differentiated offering.

Second, segmentation is the inevitable result of dimensional upgrading, and search is evidence of demand.

Zhang Yiming once said that search e-commerce is much easier than recommendation e-commerce because users explicitly state their needs.

Sometimes search isn't useful for vague or uncertain demands, not necessarily due to search technology but rather business models. Traditional e-commerce can't accurately discern user needs, so it categorizes products broadly, yielding imprecise search results.

For example, I recently searched for 'brewed soy sauce without added sugar but with natural sweeteners' and 'a business backpack with a capacity over 30L but weighing less than 1KG.' The results were unsatisfying.

However, Little Red Book data shows that in June 2024, long-tail search terms accounting for over 60% of all searches expressed users' personalized, specific needs, like 'running shoes for heavy children with wide feet' or 'cushioned running shoes recommended for a pace around 6 minutes per kilometer.'

Economic scholar Xue Taifeng notes that product quality improvement involves transitioning from sameness to differentiation. Personalized demands, though niche, can be significant when aggregated.

In other words, the higher the consumption dimension, the more segmented it becomes (though segmentation reduces efficiency). If the base is large enough, niche businesses can still be lucrative. Little Red Book resolves this contradiction.

Third, lifestyle e-commerce offers a monetization rate advantage.

Chinese e-commerce companies' monetization rates are far lower than those of Amazon.

Monetization rate refers to the portion of GMV that becomes revenue.

It's not simply a matter of higher being better. Low-cost e-commerce platforms sell large volumes of white-label products, boosting GMV but with minimal profit margins and low monetization rates.

Lifestyle e-commerce, however, focuses on premium, branded, niche products, achieving higher monetization rates through deeper consumer connections and differentiated services, appealing to investors.

Fourth, lifestyle e-commerce's core is lifestyle leaders and sharers. If they love life, they have endless motivation.

In traditional e-commerce, merchants and platforms coexist in a game of give-and-take. In lifestyle e-commerce, merchants are community members. Monetization is a value conversion of their beloved lifestyle. While traditional e-commerce is driven by income, creators here are motivated by income, passion, and fulfillment, fueling greater investment.

Writing all this has filled me with anticipation for my upcoming Little Red Book account. I'm eager to monetize, but more than the income, I want to prove that my shared lifestyle is loved and pursued.

I believe many feel the same way.

- END -