(Yicai) Sept. 15 -- Xiaohongshu will shut its e-store that sells foreign merchandise and gives shopping tips to Chinese travelers abroad, in order to pool its resources and focus on serving more procurement specialists, brand owners and vendors amid the rapid growth of the Chinese lifestyle platform’s e-commerce business.

Welfare Agency will be fully integrated into Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce business, it said today. The platform, which was set up in 2014, will stop selling merchandise on Oct. 16 and shut down on Nov. 16.

This follows the announcement last week that Xiaohongshu’s camping and outdoor sports platform Little Oasis will close at the end of next month.

E-commerce is becoming an important form of business for the Shanghai-based firm. Xiaohongshu, which boasts more than 200 million monthly active users, has seen its procurement specialists and brand owners surge 28 times in the past 18 months, and the number of consumers has soared 13-fold, it said.

Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce business will be elevated to a first-tier department, on the same level as its community services division, the Alibaba Group Holding-backed company said last month. The e-commerce business will integrate with the live sales segment to form a trading department made up of a community service section, a commercial section and a first-tier section.

Editor: Kim Taylor