The Red Cat Leaps: Inside RedNote’s Tmall Partnership

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After years of guarding its garden walls, RedNote is opening the gates — not timidly, but with a strategic flourish. Its latest partnership with Taobao and Tmall, dubbed the “Red Cat Initiative,” marks a deliberate shift from platform insularity to performance-driven pragmatism. The move allows lifestyle content posts to embed product links that redirect users to Taobao or Tmall for purchase, creating a seamless content-to-commerce experience.

For a platform once wary of external links, this is more than just a policy reversal. It’s a philosophical realignment. In 2021, RedNote formally barred creators from embedding Taobao URLs, reinforcing a walled-garden model meant to retain transaction data and user intent within its ecosystem. But now, by allowing outbound links to Alibaba’s retail platforms, RedNote is signaling a mature embrace of the commerce-content continuum — and acknowledging that influence, when monetized well, doesn’t always need to stay home.

The implications are significant. For merchants, the partnership introduces joint dashboards and integrated accounts that offer unprecedented visibility into content-to-commerce conversion. For consumers, the once-disjointed path from inspiration to transaction now unfolds as a seamless scroll-to-cart experience. And for Alibaba, this alliance adds a potent content engine to its already formidable retail machine, helping it court China’s lifestyle-savvy Gen Z more nimbly than before.

But the decision also reveals RedNote’s own internal tug-of-war. Opening external links may broaden commercial possibilities, but it comes at the risk of diluting its competitive moat. While its community-driven product discovery is powerful and continues to generate substantial ad revenue, cultivating a robust in-house e-commerce operation has proven slow and uncertain. This is the crux of RedNote’s ongoing ambivalence: it wants to preserve its distinct community culture while chasing the scale and monetization targets that come with 300 million daily active users. It wants to maintain its individuality—and grow into a much bigger business. For now, it’s choosing to put revenue in the bank first.

RedNote’s move reflects changing expectations in China’s maturing social commerce landscape. As discovery platforms are held to new performance benchmarks, the wall between “planting grass” and reaping sales is no longer tenable. RedNote’s willingness to share traffic and data with Alibaba suggests that influence without infrastructure may be leaving money on the table.

Of course, questions remain. Will this partnership erode RedNote’s control over its ecosystem, or catalyze new monetization models for creators and brands alike? How will native shops fare when outbound links become standard practice? And, most pressingly, how will the platform balance community integrity with performance pressure?

What’s clear is that this is only the beginning. Rumors of a parallel partnership with JD.com are already circulating—another sign that RedNote is pivoting from platform purity to marketplace pluralism.