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Xiaohongshu is a social e-commerce app worth billions—but can it monetize its trend-setting reputation?

The Chinese spend an average of 102 minutes each day browsing e-commerce sites, the longest in the world. On social media, they lag, but still clock in at a respectable 25th place worldwide—exactly two hours per day, and one minute behind the US.

It was only a matter of time before someone tried to combine the two trends.

Founded in 2013, Shanghai-based “social commerce” app Xiaohongshu (“Little Red Book”) has had a very good year. It had always been a relatively popular platform for buying foreign brands, a hipper alternative to using overseas “purchasing agents” (daigou) via Taobao or WeChat. In 2018, however, Xiaohongshu raised a total of 300 million USD in funding from backers such as Alibaba and Tencent, and grew its users by 40 percent to a total of 100 million, which include celebrities such as Jing Tian, Fan Bingbing, and the cast of reality show Idol Producer.

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author Hatty Liu

Hatty Liu is the managing editor of The World of Chinese, and an award-winning communications researcher. Born in China, and raised in China, Canada, and the US, she leverages her cross-cultural identity to create more empathetic knowledge across national boundaries.

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