Alibaba Group Holding is expanding the reach of its primary online marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, through a collaboration with popular Chinese social media platform RedNote, known on the mainland as Xiaohongshu, which translates to “little red book”.
The cross-platform collaboration will enable merchants on the two Chinese e-commerce sites to embed product links directly in social-media posts, according to a joint announcement on Wednesday by Taobao and Tmall Group (TTG), Alibaba’s domestic e-commerce business unit, and Shanghai-based RedNote. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
RedNote users can simply tap on the embedded product links to quickly get redirected to the Taobao app to buy goods, including those on Tmall. This would provide consumers with “a seamless path, from product discovery to purchase”, TTG said.
This initiative reflects Alibaba’s efforts to tap into the user base of RedNote, which had more than 300 million monthly active users in 2024, amid increased competition from the likes of ByteDance-owned Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok, which has a growing e-commerce business.
The move also aligns with the strategy of RedNote, which was launched in 2013 as China’s answer to Instagram, to transform what was once a relatively closed ecosystem into one that is linked with other platforms, while further monetising its operations on the back of online marketplaces.
RedNote gained nearly 3 million US users – known as “TikTok refugees” – in a single day in January to become the No 1 free-to-use social media platform across all free apps on Apple’s App Store in America. That exodus was spurred by mounting concerns over TikTok’s fate, as the US Supreme Court upheld a law requiring ByteDance to sell the short video-sharing app’s US operations to a non-Chinese buyer or get banned from app stores in America.
