Author | Liu Baodan
Editor | Huang Yu
In recent years, the cost of traffic has gradually increased. As traffic entry points, influencers, bloggers, and internet celebrities have become the groups that platforms like Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Taobao are competing to support. Now, Taobao has begun to make significant investments to support these traffic-bearing internet celebrities to open stores on Taobao.
Recently, at the 2025 Taobao Influencer Night, the head of Taobao Fashion, Kan Shan, announced that this year Taobao will invest 1 billion yuan to fully cultivate the top 100 new-generation influencers. Behind Taobao's substantial support for influencers, fashion has become a key focus area for Taobao this year.
The &#34;Influencer Night&#34; is a super influencer gala in the fashion field, initiated by Taobao, and this year marks its second edition. That evening, Taobao Fashion not only announced the latest support policies but also awarded trophies to influencers, aiming to accelerate the brand transformation of these influencers.
Fashion is the foundation of Taobao's success and is also the most fiercely competitive sector in e-commerce. According to data from Star Map during last year's Double Eleven, fashion is the third largest category with sales exceeding 100 billion yuan among comprehensive e-commerce platforms, following home appliances and mobile digital products, accounting for as much as 14%, highlighting its importance to the platform.
In recent years, small and medium-sized businesses have begun to shift towards Douyin and Xiaohongshu, putting some pressure on Taobao Fashion. Against this backdrop, Taobao is attempting to further solidify its advantages in the fashion sector by supporting influencers to open stores, which is also within external expectations.
A competition for influencers has begun, and it remains to be seen how competitors will respond.
<h2>Heavy Investment</h2>
What does 1 billion yuan mean? Based on the scale of the top 100 new-generation influencers, each can receive support resources equivalent to 10 million yuan.
Wall Street Journal has learned that this support includes customizing a &#34;super fashion show,&#34; providing &#34;new product hosting&#34; services, offering commercial subsidies, distributing millions in red envelopes, granting live streaming traffic, and increasing original content protection, among others.
Compared to the earlier strategy focused mainly on traffic subsidies and event exposure, Taobao Fashion has greater considerations, as the platform aims to promote influencers towards brand development. Compared to doing business on another platform, building a brand is clearly more attractive to influencers.
Dou Yunfeng, CEO of Jinxik Culture, started doing Taobao live streaming in 2017, and currently collaborates with 20-30 influencers. He found that live streaming IPs have a certain cycle and need constant updates; people can become fatigued. In the past two years, he has begun to help influencers solidify their brands.
Dou Yunfeng stated: &#34;We are also doing some IP promotion outside the platform, and there are still some explosive opportunities, but I think on some platforms, you can only treat traffic and selling clothes as a business, while on Taobao, building a brand can be treated as a career, with better experiences in terms of repurchase rates and stability.&#34;
Currently, Taobao has also put forward its own methodology for how influencers can grow into brands.
In the past, fashion influencers' live streams were mostly in the style of market stall owners selling goods, capable of selling products but lacking brand tone. Taobao's &#34;super fashion show&#34; uses movie-quality high-definition live streaming to assist influencers in their brand transformation. Taking the women's clothing brand CHICJOC as an example, through the &#34;super fashion show,&#34; a single store's sales exceeded 60 million yuan in one event, significantly enhancing the brand's influence
Kanshan stated that Taobao Live hopes to create a relatively high-quality live streaming room, defining it as the highlight moments of influencers coming to Taobao. This live broadcast will have high standards and aesthetic requirements, with all on-site settings and planning being handled by the top media and director teams in the country.
&#34;We are heavily investing in this because we want to convey to consumers and influencers that Taobao is not just a platform for goods, but also for live streaming, and that there is another choice, another way for live streaming,&#34; Kanshan further emphasized.
To help influencers and merchants successfully launch new products, Taobao has also introduced solutions this year, such as the new product full-service &#34;New Product Super Window,&#34; which helps new products achieve rapid sales growth and reduces the cost of launching new products for merchants.
In addition, this year Taobao will also introduce institutional support to provide influencers with design teams, e-commerce operations, supply chain construction, and other supporting services, allowing influencers on Taobao not only to sell products but also to build brands and advance to become &#34;main operators.&#34;
<h2>Competition Upgrade</h2>
Ten years ago, Taobao proposed the &#34;influencer economy&#34; and achieved e-commerce growth through the traffic effects brought by influencers. Ten years later, Taobao is once again targeting influencers, planning to support influencer stores to become brands.
&#34;The best time for influencers to enter Taobao was ten years ago, and the second best time is now,&#34; Kanshan stated. In the past two years, nearly 600 new influencers from outside the platform have opened stores on Taobao, realizing their dreams of becoming brand operators, most of whom are post-95s and post-00s new generation influencers.
According to Wall Street News, there are currently thousands of influencer stores on the Taobao platform. Kanshan stated, &#34;As of last year, there were several thousand active influencers on Taobao, the vast majority of whom are well-known fashion bloggers or streamers from outside the platform; they are mainstream.&#34;
For example, influencers such as 8uioio, Lilylikes, Heiyouran, Zhou Baizi, Huajiyan, Youwei, and Cuge have actively entered Taobao in recent years, with many achieving over 100 million in annual sales within less than two years of joining.
Fei Yan, the head of women's clothing and live streaming business on Taobao, stated that last year, there were 16 influencers who came from outside the platform with sales exceeding 100 million, and many others with sales over 10 million. &#34;This year, after increasing incentives, we estimate that sales will multiply by 5 to 10 times.&#34;
The attractiveness of Taobao to influencers lies in the stability of operations. Shang Yuxin, general manager of Kezhi Culture, started doing Taobao's agency operations in 2020, mainly screening and discovering potential influencers from platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin. He noted that while browsing Taobao, many stores have been around for over ten years, a level of stability that is hard to achieve on other platforms.
Shang Yuxin further stated that the mechanisms of different platforms vary; for example, on Douyin, some bloggers may be becoming more prominent, but on Taobao, as long as one does the necessary things well each year, business will naturally break through. &#34;The clothing sector has not seen growth for at least five years; last year it grew about 2%, which is simply not enough. In such a market, stability and sustainability may be more important.&#34;
From a business perspective, Taobao also has its own advantages. Kanshan stated that Taobao's search experience is very valuable for influencers, as Taobao's demand is more about users actively searching. The platform can use data analysis to directly feed back business opportunities and trends to influencers
This also means that influencers can not only operate on Taobao to better serve their existing fans and maintain engagement, but they can also break the boundaries of fan and user assets, which greatly helps in the development of influencers' products.
However, the challenges are also evident. As a traditional sector, apparel has become a battleground for competitors, with Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and JD.com continuously increasing their investments in this area, which will undoubtedly put pressure on Taobao's apparel segment.
A visible reality is that even though many influencers choose to enter Taobao, many are still filling in the gaps of the e-commerce puzzle, as many streamers or bloggers continue to focus their live broadcasts on Xiaohongshu or Douyin. Taobao will need time to establish a unique live streaming mindset.
JD.com is also taking proactive measures. Earlier this year, JD.com Apparel has brought in former Alibaba executives to lead its fashion and beauty business group. In August last year, JD.com Apparel announced an investment of 1 billion yuan and subsequently participated in London Fashion Week. Clearly, JD.com aims to build a fashion mindset beyond home appliances and digital products.
The offensive and defensive battle in the apparel sector for 2025 has already begun, and it will be a tough fight for Taobao's apparel segment

BYTED

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