Social E-commerce Platforms Comparison—-Little Red Book vs. WeChat Mini-program

When it comes to social e-commerce, the first thing that comes to Chinese people’s mind is WeiShang (WeChat Business), the people who sells goods to their friends in “Moments”. This interactive sales, which is in line with China’s deeply-rooted “human relationship culture” achieves great success in China. The rapid expansion of this group has brought WeChat Mini-program to life and the socialization of e-commerce has become a major trend, epitomized by Little Red Book. This article discusses what Little Red Book and WeChat Mini-program can do with e-commerce and the difference between them.

Supervision of pre-sale and after-sale service

(1) Pre-sale Service—Goods Uploading Censoring

Little Red Book requires companies to submit information including spv, spl, spl, item and item and wait for censorship after finishing the brand/store entering process. After that, you should provide product pictures, product name, the price and the tax rate to be verified. What’s more, if the company is doing overseas business, then the customs information will be required when uploading the product.

However, in WeChat mini-program, you don’t need to do such many things. After successfully setting up the mini-program, you can shelve up to 3,000 items after submitting product details including product name, product pictures, price, types and inventory.

(2) After-sale Service—Changing and Returning Service

In LRB (Little Red Book) sets a 7-day no-reason returning policy for domestic businesses and provides a supervision mechanism for consumer complaint and violations penalization. According to the severity, violators face penalties from points deduction, liquidated damages, store traffic restrictions to store freezes.

As for Mini-program, WeChat doesn’t act like LRB (Little Red Book) that it doesn’t provide a mechanism to resolve disputes between merchants and consumers. And once the consumers pay in the mini-program, the money will be immediately transferred to the merchant’s accounts, which put consumers in a passive position.

Logistics Management System

Little Red Book has its own logistics warehousing system including domestic and overseas logistics as well as bonded warehouse and trade warehouse for domestic and foreign businesses. Even though, merchants can choose to have their own shipments or delivery. However, if the logistics service is not friendly enough for consumers, the platform will require merchants to use LRB logistics.

As you can see on last post, Mini-program developed a new logistics function recently called “Logistics Assistant” that both developers and consumers can track the logistics information of the products. But at present it supports only domestic express companies.

Order Processing System

For those hot shops, the order and inventory processing is a key issue. Therefore, Little Red Book provides API interfaces and documents for merchants to connect the orders and inventory modules for more efficient order management. At present, LRB has cooperated with a number of major ERP systems in China, for example, Hupun.

1.Merchants can get appkey and appsecret in the Little Red Book platform. https://ark.xiaohongshu.com/

2.And then input the store name, appkey and appsecret, add the store in ERP system.

In this way, merchants in LRB can uniformly manage and edit the raw data of commodities in the ERP system, and can synchronize the inventory, which improves management efficiency, reduces error rates and management costs. Also, some of the ERP systems allow multi-store management. For the brands who sell products in various e-commerce platforms, the standard specification and highly automated unified order processing process provided by ERP system avoids human error and saves the human cost. Sellers can also choose to manually operate in the background as they do in Mini-program, which doesn’t support ERP systems yet.

Take Away

Both the mini-program and Little Red Book contains social marketing function and E-commerce function. However, as for E-commerce function, it is obvious that LRB has a more complete E-commerce system from order placing to order completion. Mini-program provides a simplified transaction process which does benefit the businesses who don’t want to spend too much on store maintenance. And for those hot stores with large sales and more orders, LRB’s E-commerce system would make them more manageable.

On the other hand, trust plays a more important role in Mini-program ecommerce than in Little Red Book since there is no regulatory platform in Mini-program. Therefore, small and medium enterprise, which are not well-known in China, should pay more attention on trust issue if they are looking to start ecommerce on Mini-program.