Xiaohongshu E-Commerce: How to Sell on RedNote

Most foreign brands on Xiaohongshu have an audience. Very few have a store. That gap is where the money leaks.

Xiaohongshu, known outside China as RedNote, spent ten years being the place where Chinese consumers decide what to buy. It is now trying to be the place where they actually buy. Those are two different businesses, and the second one is far harder. If you only run content here, you are paying to fill someone else’s shopping cart.

This guide is about the closed loop: opening a real shop on Xiaohongshu as a foreign brand, what it costs, what documents you need, and the mechanism that turns a saved note into a paid order. If you want the content and search side, we covered that separately in our guide to Xiaohongshu as a search engine for brands.

I am Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I have been in Shanghai since 2012. My team has opened and run Xiaohongshu stores for European and American brands since the platform first allowed merchant accounts, and I have seen what happens when a brand skips the store step.

Key Takeaways

• Xiaohongshu’s on-platform conversion rate sits between 0.7% and 1.2%, the lowest of the major Chinese platforms. Most purchases still finish somewhere else.
• Advertising made up 76% of Xiaohongshu’s 2025 revenue. The platform makes far more from selling attention than from taking a cut of your sales, and that shapes how it treats you.
• Foreign brands cannot open a store as individuals. A company entity is required, either a Chinese one or an overseas one going through the cross-border route.
• Commissions run roughly 5% to 8% by category, plus a 0.5% technical service fee, with a refundable deposit from 1,000 RMB to 50,000 RMB.
• The conversion mechanism is the product tag inside the note. No tag, no closed loop, and less distribution for the note itself.

Why Brands Sell a Lot on Xiaohongshu and Earn Nothing

Here is the uncomfortable number. According to a Huxiu analysis published on 1 March 2026, Xiaohongshu made 42 billion RMB in revenue in 2025, up 40%, and 32 billion of that came from advertising. Advertising is now 76% of the company’s income, against 65% two years earlier. Meanwhile the platform’s own conversion rate stayed at 0.7% to 1.2%.

Read that twice. The platform that everyone calls an e-commerce app earns three quarters of its money selling you traffic, not selling your products. The shoppers do the discovery on Xiaohongshu and complete the payment on Taobao, JD or WeChat. In May 2025 Xiaohongshu even formalised this with Alibaba through the Hongmao programme, letting sponsored notes link straight to Taobao stores.

So the brand runs 40 notes a month, the impressions look great, and the finance director asks where the revenue is. It is on another platform, attributed to another channel, at a margin the brand does not control.

Xiaohongshu knows this is its weak point and has been closing it. In November 2025 it bought Dongfang Payment outright and injected 200 million RMB of registered capital, picking up a third party payment licence, as 21st Century Business Herald reported on 6 November 2025. That was the last missing piece: content, transaction and payment now sit inside one company. Worth noting that the licence renewal was put under suspended review by the central bank on 30 April 2026, so the file is not fully closed. Day to day merchant operations are unaffected, but it tells you how young this infrastructure still is.

The Demand Is Real, and It Is Specific

The closed loop is small compared to Taobao, but the buying intent behind it is unusually strong. At its GROW merchant conference in Shanghai on 8 April 2026, Xiaohongshu disclosed that 39 million users a day show explicit purchase intent on the platform, generating 140 million active product requests daily. Its Rise100 top merchants grew GMV 2.6 times year on year in 2025, with an average repurchase rate of 32% and returning customers accounting for 81% of spend, according to Guangzhou Daily’s report of the event.

A 32% repurchase rate is a retail number, not a social media number. It says the people who do buy inside Xiaohongshu behave like customers, not like impulse clickers. That is the case for building the store.

Opening a Xiaohongshu Store as a Foreign Brand

Start with the entity question, because it decides everything else. Individuals and sole traders cannot open a cross-border store. Xiaohongshu Global Purchase requires a company, and you have two routes.

Route one, a Chinese entity. You register a WFOE or work through a Chinese trading partner who holds the licence. You sell from Chinese stock, you invoice in RMB, you get the full feature set and the fastest logistics. This is what we recommend to any brand already selling in China.

Route two, cross-border. An overseas or Hong Kong entity can register directly. You will need the business registration certificate, the legal representative’s passport, an overseas settlement account, and customs documentation for the goods. Delivery runs from a bonded warehouse or direct mail, which means 5 to 10 days instead of 48 hours.

On brand authorisation, the rule loosened in 2026. If you cannot obtain an exclusive authorisation letter, a complete procurement chain file, invoices, customs entries and supplier contracts, is accepted instead. Big names like Estée Lauder and SK-II sit on a platform whitelist and need no letter at all.

Store Types

Xiaohongshu offers three store levels, and the differences are real. Personal stores are the entry point for small sellers: identity card, no follower minimum, approval in about an hour, product listings capped in the low hundreds. Individual business and company stores require a business licence and open up the tools that matter, live streaming, the ad platform, category permissions.

Enterprise stores are for brands with volume. Verified badges, custom shop design, priority support, direct access to the flash sale and campaign calendar. If you are a serious brand, this is your only sensible option. The verification badge alone changes how Chinese shoppers read your page.

Documents and Timeline

Prepare the business licence, the legal representative’s ID or passport, the bank account details, the tax registration, and the category certificates. Food needs an import permit. Cosmetics need NMPA filing. Jewellery needs assay documents. Missing category paperwork is the single most common reason an application stalls.

Basic verification takes 2 to 5 working days once the file is complete. In practice, count six to ten weeks from decision to first order for a foreign brand, because the entity, the bank account and the category filings all take longer than the platform review itself.

What It Actually Costs

There is no entry fee and no annual platform fee. Xiaohongshu earns on transactions. Published merchant rules in 2026 look like this, though rates shift by category and by campaign, so check yours before you build a P&L on them.

New merchants get a commission holiday on their first three months, and cross-border Global Purchase sellers were included in that policy in 2026. Use it to test, not to celebrate. The real cost of Xiaohongshu is not the commission, it is the traffic you buy through the Juguang ad platform and the fees you pay creators through Dandelion. Budget those separately, and read our breakdown of the Xiaohongshu paid ads system before you set a monthly number.

The Mechanism That Converts: Note to Product Card

This is the part brands get wrong, so I will be blunt about how it works.

On Xiaohongshu, a note only becomes a sale if a product tag is attached to it. The tag links the note to a listing in your store, and the reader buys without leaving the app. No tag means the reader has to remember your brand name, search it elsewhere, and find you. Most do not.

Second, the platform binds your account and your store together under a system called account-store integration. Your content account and your shop are the same identity. Your followers see a shop tab. Your notes carry your products. Your customer service happens in the same inbox.

Third, and this is the part nobody tells you, Xiaohongshu actively suppresses notes that push people off the platform. A note with a product tag pointing to your own store gets more distribution than the same note pointing at a website or a WeChat account. The store is not just a checkout, it is a distribution advantage.

Practical order of operations: open the store first, then bind the account, then tag your best performing existing notes, then buy traffic. Brands that do it backwards spend twelve months building an audience they cannot sell to. That is also why several of the errors in our list of Xiaohongshu mistakes Western brands make come back to the same missing shop.

Livestream Here Is Not Douyin Livestream

Do not copy your Douyin playbook. Xiaohongshu livestream has a different economy. Average basket values sit far above the short video platforms, sellers routinely report over 500 RMB per order, and return rates run lower. The sessions are slow, conversational, and often run by a single buyer or founder talking through ten products in two hours. Shouting discounts does not work.

Since late 2024 the platform has pushed brands towards shop livestream, run by the brand itself on a fixed weekly schedule, rather than depending on external buyer hosts. That change matters for foreign brands: you do not need a celebrity host, you need a Chinese speaking presenter who knows the product and shows up at the same hour every week. Consistency beats star power on this platform. If you want the contrast with the short video model, we compared both in TikTok vs RedNote.

A Belgian Brand That Fixed the Leak

Dries runs a Belgian leather goods company, bags and small accessories, average retail around 2,800 RMB. He came to us with eighteen months of Xiaohongshu content behind him: roughly 40 seeded notes a month, 2.4 million cumulative impressions, a healthy save rate. China revenue had not moved.

The diagnosis took one afternoon. He had no store. Every note ended with a bio link to a WeChat mini program. His paid campaigns pushed the same way. Click-through was acceptable, conversion on the mini program was 0.3%, and his top notes were getting throttled because they read as off-platform diversion.

We opened a company store through his Hong Kong entity on the cross-border route, bound it to his existing content account, and tagged products into his twelve best performing notes rather than producing new ones. Then we started a shop livestream, Tuesday and Thursday evenings, same two hours, run by his China market manager.

Two things happened. The tagged notes got more reach than they had when they were untagged, because the platform stopped treating them as leakage. And the livestream, which never exceeded 900 concurrent viewers, produced steady orders because the audience was already warm from the notes.

Five months in, the Xiaohongshu store accounted for 31% of his China revenue. Average order value 2,600 RMB, return rate 11%, repurchase rate 24%. Not spectacular growth. Just the revenue that had been walking out of the door for a year and a half, staying inside.

FAQ

Do I need a Chinese company to sell on Xiaohongshu?

Not necessarily, but you do need a company. Individuals cannot open a cross-border store. An overseas or Hong Kong entity can register through Global Purchase with its business registration certificate, the legal representative’s passport, an overseas settlement account and customs documents. A Chinese entity gives you faster delivery, RMB settlement and the full feature set, so if China is a real market for you, plan for one eventually.

How long does it take to go from decision to first order?

Platform verification itself takes 2 to 5 working days once your file is complete. The realistic timeline is six to ten weeks. The delays come from the entity, the bank account, and category specific paperwork such as NMPA filing for cosmetics or import permits for food. Brands that miss their launch date almost always miss it on category certificates, not on the store application.

Should I keep selling on Tmall if I open a Xiaohongshu store?

Yes. Xiaohongshu is not a Tmall replacement, the volume is not there. Treat it as a high margin channel that captures the demand your content already creates, instead of donating that demand to a marketplace where you pay for the click again. Most of our clients run both, and measure Xiaohongshu on contribution margin rather than raw GMV.

Can I run the store without a Chinese speaking team?

No. Customer service happens inside the app, response time affects your store rating, and buyers ask detailed questions before purchase. Livestream needs a native presenter. Product pages need to be written in Chinese by someone who understands how Chinese shoppers read specifications. Outsourcing this to an agency or an in-house Chinese hire is not optional, it is the operating cost of the channel.

GMA, Your Xiaohongshu Partner in China

GMA opens and operates Xiaohongshu stores for foreign brands, from entity choice and category filings to product pages, tagged notes and weekly shop livestreams.

We work on the closed loop, which means we report on orders and margin, not on impressions.

Talk to us if you already have an audience on Xiaohongshu and no store to send it to.