Xiaohongshu is going to "bring goods" for Taobao and Tmall.

On May 7, Taobao and Tmall (hereinafter referred to as "Taotian") reached a strategic cooperation with Xiaohongshu. The two parties jointly created the "Red Cat Plan", announcing that the two parties will further open up and integrate, open up the entire link from planting grass to pulling weed (purchasing), and jointly promote the growth of merchants' business.

Source: Official Photo provided

Source: Official Photo provided

Judging from the information released by both parties, this cooperation has three core information:

First, the platform data is interconnected, and the two parties have reached strategic cooperation on brand merchants' planting . Through the co-built three-party accounts, brand merchants can observe the full link effect from planting grass to placing orders, improving delivery efficiency. At the same time, Taotian brand merchants can also directly place them in Xiaohongshu.

The second is the support of real money . Taotian said it will increase investment, heat and invest in merchants’ notes, and improve consumption interaction. In other words, merchants of the "Red Cat Plan" can receive Taobao subsidies to increase the exposure of notes.

The third is business linkage. Both parties will jointly add the "Advertising Chain" function below the notes. For brands that have joined the pilot in the early stage, you can directly hang Taotian’s store link below the advertising notes, and users of grass planting can jump directly to achieve “direct grass planting”.

This means that on the eve of the 618 e-commerce promotion, Taotian dug up more than 300 million monthly active traffic of Xiaohongshu, connecting the link between Xiaohongshu's "planting grass" notes and Taotian's "pulling grass" transactions for the first time.

Under this innovative model of "content + transaction", consumers can jump to Taotian to place orders with one click to bring more efficient and high-quality delivery conversions to brand merchants.

Hold hands and integrate, merchants usher in triple benefits

According to my understanding, the current cooperation between the two parties is only open to some high-quality pilot merchants. At the same time, the "Advertising Chain" function is temporarily only for advertising notes, and not all community notes can be redirected. But they will be gradually opened up in the future.

Even so, for merchants, the deepening of grass planting cooperation between Taotian and Xiaohongshu has opened up new space for business growth. As the cooperation between the two parties deepens, merchants will also usher in triple benefits:

First of all, merchants have accurate delivery and can see where every penny is spent. Given its own content attributes, there is a pain point in the commercialization process of Xiaohongshu. Brand merchants lack actual conversion backlink data, making it difficult to measure the effect of investing and planting grass.

For example, a merchant takes into account multiple accounts and places a grass-planting note. Although he can see the number of views, likes, forwards or crowd portraits, how many transaction conversions are generated in the end, where the user places an order, and how much advertising is wasted, has always been a puzzle.

Merchants’ operations should also reduce costs and increase efficiency. The advertising chain in the “Red Cat Plan” can improve delivery efficiency and help merchants focus on the conversion of single products. At the same time, merchants can clearly see where their advertising costs are spent and how the input-output ratio is through a three-party account co-built account.

In addition, merchants can also use Taotian’s more scientific platform tools to bid farewell to the extensive investment flow of flooding and casting nets to catch fish in the past. For example, in response to different grass planting needs and drainage scenarios, Taobao provides merchants with grass planting products and drainage options that adapt to different scenarios, such as star species, star companion plans, and star missions.

Secondly, break the situation and return to value competition: good products are worth more and more good grass planting, which is conducive to branded management. Although Taotian has always advocated quality-price ratio, in an environment where industry internal circulation is only recognized as low prices and only refunds, brand merchants are inevitably eroded by excessive price internal circulation and fall into the dilemma of "selling at a loss". It is difficult for consumers to actively "pull" the quality products of high-quality merchants to take the initiative to "pull" them in a shorter way.

Taotian fired the first shot of counter-revolution, reducing the burden, improving efficiency and seeking incremental results for merchants. The "Red Cat Plan" is also a platform's measure to support quality merchants and high-quality products: through the entire network, it will help more good products be planted by users, and more grass planting "seeking links" are also taken over by high-quality products.

This business mentality is conducive to promoting the industry to return to value competition and will also create greater business imagination for Taobao and Tmall. Merchants will eventually gain the greatest profit, and can focus more on goods and services, and enrich the internal quality of brand management.

Third, the full link is opened and merchants' business has achieved certain growth. An endogenous driving force for the popularity of grass planting economy is that the personalized consumption needs expressed by consumers on the content platform are fully explored. From planting grass to planting grass, consumers get a more silky consumption experience, and the side effect is that brand merchants obtain global traffic. All-region operation is also an important part of Taotian's business strategy in recent years.

Tmall President Jia Luo has repeatedly stated that the traffic of Tmall flagship stores is the brand's private domain traffic, and Tmall's brand users are the brand's own user assets.

Through one-click jump, the "Red Cat Plan" clears the "bottlenecks" of consumers from purchasing decisions to placing orders, bringing massive off-site traffic, and implementing a closed-loop of "planting grass-conversion-feedback" business loop throughout the Internet, allowing brand merchants to have real and new opportunities for certain growth. This is the most attractive thing for brand merchants.

In addition, under the "Red Cat Plan", the delivery environment for "Brand X Tmall" joint grass planting is more guaranteed: through co-management accounts and brand guidance, the "production-based reporting" link is realized, and the traffic is more guaranteed.

Of course, merchants are willing to increase investment and are also a real benefit to the platform. In addition to the platform's own business strategy, Taotian has obtained grass planting traffic from content platforms such as Xiaohongshu to achieve transaction improvement. At the same time, Taotian also hedged traffic pressure by practicing internal skills and finding foreign aids, and digging deep into the moat of content.

Through cooperation, Xiaohongshu has made more advertising and even shared profits through sales. On the other hand, the transaction data after planting grass and the merchants it attracts are also beneficial to Xiaohongshu's own e-commerce operations.

External seeds are harvested, Taobao grass planting will be further developed

This landmark step taken by both parties is a useful exploration that is regarded by the industry as a "win-win for all parties" : Taotian wins traffic, Xiaohongshu relieves business anxiety, merchants obtain certain business, and consumers enjoy a silky "grass-pulling weed" experience.

In fact, this is not the first time Taotian has collaborated with Xiaohongshu. The most recent one was in 2022, when the two sides jointly launched grass planting observation plans such as "Little Red Star". It monitors the conversion effect through data backload from Taobao, helping merchants explore the value of grass planting.

After nearly three years of running-in, Taotian's grass planting effect on Xiaohongshu has been verified in data. Through the high-quality grass-growing content connected to Xiaohongshu, Taobao can efficiently convert it into actual purchases, becoming a new increase in business for merchants, especially in core categories such as beauty and clothing.

According to official data, in the past year, through the "Little Red Star" system, the click rate of Taotian brand merchants in grass planting notes on Xiaohongshu has increased by 20%, and the interaction rate has increased by 109%.

Among them, the average daily number of merchants participating in Taotian Liantou increased by 335% year-on-year, the store entry rate of brand merchants in sports industry increased by 85% year-on-year, and the store entry rate of brand merchants in beauty industry increased by 41.5% year-on-year.

Source: Xiaohongshu

Source: Xiaohongshu

Taotian has tried many "internal planting and external harvesting" projects, which are to guide external grass traffic to site consumption - this is also what Taotian has always been good at accepting demand and completing consumption - but it is mostly at the business level, such as Alibaba Mom, Taobao Alliance, etc.

With the decline of the dividends of traditional e-commerce and the changes in user consumption habits, Alibaba has also accelerated its demolition of walls and implemented an open strategy of interconnection. The whole-region operation has become the consensus of Alibaba e-commerce, that is, to assist brands, especially small and medium-sized brand merchants, to expand the entire network.

At the 2025 Tmall Super Brand Private Conference held on March 26, Jialuo bluntly stated that Tmall’s focus this year is on growth. Among them, one of the key points of Tmall’s investment is off-site traffic.

He made it clear that this year, he will strengthen cooperation with social media such as Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili to facilitate brands and Tmall to carry out full-region operations, focus on supporting the full-region operations of high-quality brands, and ultimately guide users to Tmall for transactions.

"In the past year, merchants who use grass planting and foreign investment to return to Tmall have gained a lot. We hope to do more radical strategic operations this year under such a strategy. The core is that in the next new year, brands will do more feed back strategies, cooperation strategies, and even traffic investment strategies to promote this field to do better through more grass planting and foreign investment to the flagship store business." He said.

The "Red Cat Plan" is the most fired shot by Taotian at this node: it not only demands traffic from the entire region, but also brings certain growth to merchants. Its essence is also an extension of Taotian's entire region business strategy, namely "planting grass on the entire network and making transactions in Taotian", Xiaohongshu is just an important part of it. For example, after Taotian opened the WeChat payment portal, JPMorgan Chase calculated that the interconnection between the two parties is expected to bring 20%-30% incremental users to Taobao, which are 200 million to 300 million WeChat users.

Jialuo said at the launch of the "Red Cat Plan": "The cooperation with Xiaohongshu is a very important step in Taobao and Tmall's entire region operation in 2025." He also revealed that at present, Taobao and Tmall have established cooperation with more than 200 Internet platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, Alipay, Bilibili, Zhihu, etc. to support the entire region operation of high-quality brands and increase growth.

"Content + Transaction", the new model also has new challenges

The launch of the "Red Cat Plan" also points out a trend in the post-mobile Internet era: the boundaries of the platform are like the dividing line of the Yellow and Bohai Seas, both clear and integrated. Open cooperation is replacing closed-loop barriers and becoming a new direction for industry development.

In my opinion, Taotian cooperates with off-site content platforms with an open mind, and is also expanding a new "content + transaction" model, which has a different meaning from the "content e-commerce" endogenous to the platform.

The key is that niche new consumer needs such as healing economy, cute pet economy, lazy economy, and creative replacement have strong social attributes and emotional values, which are suitable for planting grass, but they also test the platform's commodity supply capacity.

Merchants can hardly achieve high-frequency and repeated reach to consumers through a single content e-commerce platform. If we want to promote active purchase and long-term retention, stores are the best way to carry this part of the "grass" traffic, and it is also the best way for brands to operate private domain traffic.

For example, since the end of last year, content e-commerce platforms began to consciously reduce their dependence on top super anchors and vigorously support store broadcasts and expert broadcasts. This is also considered in this regard, hoping that users will settle into the store. However, because of the contradiction between "content" and "transaction", it is difficult to form a large-scale positive cycle of "grass planting - decision-making - repurchase" among brand merchants.

In other words, consumers may develop emotional purchasing desire through content e-commerce (short videos, live streaming products) to transform and satisfy emotional needs. It becomes the norm to leave after buying, but this is not a good business for brands and merchants.

Therefore, in order to attract "repeated customers" and not do "one-time business", most brands and merchants will still choose comprehensive e-commerce platforms as the main base for long-term business operations and cultivate users into their own regular customers and regular customers.

I once mentioned that the significance of brand merchants opening stores in Taotian is not only limited to selling goods, but more importantly, the improvement of brand value. Taotian is still one of the preferred platforms for merchants to operate their brands, gathering a large number of high-quality supplies.

Against this background, "planting grass outside the site and completing Taobao transactions" has become the business model that best meets the needs of all parties. All parties have their own needs, and "universal Taobao" has also further confirmed the role of content platform e-commerce infrastructure.

Because of Taotian's business ecosystem, there are large brands such as Apple and Huawei, as well as many small and medium-sized high-quality merchants, such as a large number of 1688 source factories. This inclusive advantage is something that many other platforms do not have.

Source: Photographed by Tang Chen

Source: Photographed by Tang Chen

But we must also note that the imagination space of this cooperation is infinite and the challenges are not small.

First of all, both sides are advancing “limited”. Although both sides started testing Little Red Star two years ago, it was not until today that the gates were opened to release water, so they naturally had their own considerations. For example, Taobao has started to "content" since 2020 and has been constantly trying to build its own "Little Red Book". The "Red Cat Plan" is not currently open to all merchants and grass planting notes.

Moreover, Xiaohongshu has not given up its e-commerce ambitions, and its own e-commerce and "integrated number and store" strategy is still advancing. In the long run, both sides still need to re-align their strategic goals repeatedly.

Secondly, "grass planting + e-commerce" will eventually require good content, good products and good services to undertake. In other words, whether Xiaohongshu can find a balance between content and commercialization and whether Taotian can continuously provide consumers with high-quality supply are all challenges.

In addition, there may be cross-platform data supervision requirements hidden between platforms.

It can also be seen from this level that the choice between the two sides to break the wall on the eve of 618 is also considered for testing. A reasonable guess is that 618 is a stress test. If it passes, the cooperation between the two parties will expand rapidly.

But as Xiaohongshu COO Conan said, "Tmall is a very important partner on the road to openness. For brands, "planting grass" on Xiaohongshu is not only the first contact point with users, but also the first starting point for full-link operations."

Taotian and Xiaohongshu show unprecedented tacit understanding on "planting grass on the entire network and completing Taobao transactions". Both parties hope to break through this move, introduce external traffic and transactions to boost activity within the site, and then cultivate a win-win mechanism or ecosystem, so that good content and good products can be matched efficiently, and complete the cross-platform "content + transaction" closed loop.

[Editor in charge: Huang Mengyu PT136]