Zhuanzhuan's future remains within the second-hand industry, but it will no longer be confined to the e-commerce platform battleground.

"Your laptop is a MacBook Air 2020 model, 95% new condition, really well-maintained." In August, when meeting Zhuanzhuan Group founder and CEO Huang Wei, this was the first sentence he blurted out. Within Zhuanzhuan, nearly 10,000 employees have a unified nickname for Huang Wei — "County Chief."

From 2007 to 2015, he worked successively at major companies like Baidu and 58.com, responsible for LBS and second-hand business lines. When he founded Zhuanzhuan in 2015, Huang Wei was serving as Vice President of 58.com, having personally witnessed the 10-year battle between 58.com and Ganji.com.

As one of China's first-generation internet product managers, online models held extraordinary significance for Huang Wei. Like the current AI circle's faith in large language models, he once passionately and fearlessly believed that the internet was the ultimate solution to all problems.

But 10 years have passed. Living in the shadow of giants like Alibaba and JD.com, Zhuanzhuan has experienced life-and-death trials including broken capital chains, and Huang Wei now has a different perspective on online business. Today, he says what he does most is subtraction.

On September 22, 2025, Zhuanzhuan announced it would gradually shut down its C2C business line — which is also Xianyu's largest territory. Huang Wei described this to us as a "strategic retreat."

Next, Zhuanzhuan will launch a 100% C2B2C model. In the future, sellers can conduct transactions on Zhuanzhuan through various methods including recycling, consignment, and listing. During transactions, Zhuanzhuan provides "official verification" services, meaning goods undergo official quality inspection before being listed on the Zhuanzhuan platform or offline stores for sale.

Zhuanzhuan's abandonment of direct battlefield competition with Xianyu in C2C wasn't entirely unexpected by the market. "Zhuanzhuan lacks the community ecosystem like Xianyu to attract user retention, and could previously only maintain its presence in the C2C market through heavy advertising," said Zhang Yi, founder of iiMedia Research.

Data predicts that China's second-hand market has exceeded 3 trillion yuan in scale. Besides Zhuanzhuan, Xianyu, and ATRenew, Douyin and Kuaishou are also entering the market, making competition fierce.

"Second-hand goods are destined to have limited and unstable supply. ATRenew and Xianyu can both achieve ecosystem integration with their backing from JD.com and Alibaba respectively, while the synergistic effects between Zhuanzhuan and 58.com lack competitive advantages," said Zhuang Shuai, e-commerce expert and founder of Baililian Consulting.

"Going light doesn't work, we need to go heavy. Focusing on traffic doesn't work, we need to focus on supply." In 2025, Huang Wei is determined to lead Zhuanzhuan in a resolute transformation.

Zhuanzhuan isn't starting from zero. In fact, since 2019, Zhuanzhuan has been transforming toward the C2B2C model, and now C2C business accounts for less than 3% of the group's total business.

For the second-hand industry, trust is the most core metric. "C2B2C and official verification services were pioneered by Zhuanzhuan," Zhang Yi said. Additionally, seven-day no-reason returns and door-to-door device inspection were also Zhuanzhuan's innovations.

From 2021 to 2025, after Zhuanzhuan's headquarters relocated to Qingdao, it achieved cumulative revenue exceeding 25 billion yuan, opened over 1,000 stores nationwide, and registered over 400 million users.

Regarding the future, Zhang Yi believes Zhuanzhuan's winning strategy still lies in improving service quality and user experience. Today, Zhuanzhuan has become a new consumer enterprise in the new economic environment.

In June this year, Super Zhuanzhuan, occupying over 3,000 square meters, opened in Beijing. This is currently the largest-scale global second-hand multi-category circular warehouse store.

Going solo also means stronger autonomy. "Their (Alibaba's and JD.com's) priority is never the second-hand industry, but group synergy. But we have autonomous decision-making power for innovation," Huang Wei said.

**Cutting Off C2C, Abandoning the Final 3%**

"I never knew what type of company Zhuanzhuan really belonged to. Because we never appeared in internet company rankings, nor in e-commerce company rankings."

Making the decision to shut down C2C business, Huang Wei had no hesitation, but the process wasn't easy.

Zhuanzhuan was born in 2015, during the golden period of China's mobile internet, when it was just a project incubated within 58.com. That year, the nation's first innovation and entrepreneurship-themed Zhongguancun Entrepreneurship Street was completed; Alibaba went public in the US, creating the largest IPO in US stock history at the time; Didi Dache received over $700 million in new funding; a group of Peking University students founded ofo, and "little yellow bikes" ignited the sharing economy track.

"Uber Everything" was the common faith of trendsetters in the internet, and Huang Wei, then Vice President of 58.com, was one of them.

In 2015, Huang Wei officially spun off Zhuanzhuan independently. At the same time, "Taobao Second-hand" also became independent from Alibaba, renamed as "Xianyu," and quickly became one of Alibaba's key business units.

Carrying the halo of 58.com, Huang Wei led Zhuanzhuan to quickly carve out a territory in the capital market. Over 10 years, Zhuanzhuan received nearly $1 billion in investment from well-known institutions like Tencent and Xiaomi, with public data showing its latest valuation exceeding 21 billion yuan.

But competitors were also surging ahead. In 2019, Xianyu's platform annual transaction volume reached 189.4 billion yuan, with year-over-year growth of 94%. After ATRenew merged with JD.com's Paipai, its valuation also exceeded $2.5 billion.

During these 10 years, from surviving to finding growth to returning to product focus, Zhuanzhuan continuously transformed, but the battle on the second-hand e-commerce table became increasingly fierce.

Within Alibaba's ecosystem, Xianyu's priority was continuously elevated. On February 1, 2025, Alibaba founder Jack Ma appeared at Alibaba's Hangzhou campus and specifically visited the Xianyu work area.

A QuestMobile report shows Xianyu's monthly active users exceeded 200 million in March 2025. According to the financial report of ATRenew's parent company, Wanwuxinsheng: In 2024, ATRenew achieved revenue of 16.33 billion yuan.

Among the three-way competition between Xianyu, ATRenew, and Zhuanzhuan, Zhuanzhuan is arguably the only startup company.

"Xianyu has obvious synergistic effects with Taobao's ecosystem and has done community building very well. ATRenew, backed by JD.com, also has professional credibility in its focused 3C field," Zhuang Shuai analyzed.

While 58.com has information platform attributes, its user scale is also one level behind, and Zhuanzhuan cannot synergize with the main site, having to walk on its own.

Huang Wei spoke frankly: "Against this competitive backdrop, if Zhuanzhuan isn't careful, it could really die."

**Hitting the Brakes Under Pain, Investing 200 Million Yuan in Standardization**

In 2017, Tencent invested $200 million in Zhuanzhuan. In 2018, Tencent embedded Zhuanzhuan into WeChat Pay's "nine-grid" services.

Leveraging the 58.com ecosystem and WeChat entry point, Zhuanzhuan's traffic skyrocketed. Starting in 2019, Zhuanzhuan engaged in "offensive" competition with Xianyu, heavily investing in advertising and embarking on a "money-burning" journey.

On the platform, Zhuanzhuan's promotional materials were "magically brainwashing," and it sponsored numerous variety shows, with marketing costs remaining high. To attract users, Zhuanzhuan's mobile device inspection service in 2019 charged only a symbolic one yuan.

In Zhuanzhuan's self-created door-to-door service, users could stop transactions at any stage, with all related costs borne by Zhuanzhuan.

In the interview, Huang Wei mentioned the word "user" over 60 times in one hour — user experience is his greatest confidence in industry competition.

But Huang Wei also frankly admitted that to comprehensively create a product experience satisfying consumers, Zhuanzhuan never calculated input-output ratios.

In 2019, Zhuanzhuan was rumored to have a broken capital chain. At its most difficult time, Zhuanzhuan could only maintain six months of salary payments.

"If we hadn't made fundamental distinctions from Xianyu then, Zhuanzhuan couldn't have survived."

Under crisis, Zhuanzhuan decisively turned toward the C2B2C model and pioneered official verification, seven-day no-reason returns, 365-day quality assurance, and other second-hand transaction services, somewhat solving trust issues in the second-hand market.

In 2020, Xianyu launched similar "verification treasure" services, and ATRenew also followed with official device inspection.

"Shutting down the free market is difficult but a necessary and firm choice," Huang Wei said. In his view, trust issues are the biggest barrier in the second-hand industry, and when problems arise in user-to-user transactions, the platform pays the bill.

In July 2022, Zhuanzhuan began achieving profitability.

Although Zhuanzhuan also experienced growing pains during its transformation to C2B2C. On November 28, 2023, self-media blogger "Monkey Big Shot" released a video claiming Zhuanzhuan issued conflicting inspection reports. At that time, Zhuanzhuan had just turned profitable, and this video instantly plunged Zhuanzhuan into public controversy.

"The person I care about most gave me the worst evaluation." Huang Wei was tormented, watching the video from Monkey Big Shot repeatedly and scrolling through the comment section again and again.

Huang Wei didn't shirk any responsibility. "User experience — the earlier such crises explode, the better." He stated in his announcement: "Harming user experience deserves criticism." He also promised that Zhuanzhuan would subsequently launch seven-day no-reason returns nationwide, making Zhuanzhuan the first second-hand e-commerce platform to provide this service.

The lesson of blood and tears made Huang Wei understand that merely focusing on service isn't a panacea — standardization is crucial and key to good user experience.

At the end of 2023, he set a goal for Zhuanzhuan, which had just been profitable for two years: abandon growth and have all staff fight a "user experience improvement" defensive battle.

Huang Wei revealed: Throughout 2024, Zhuanzhuan spent over 200 million yuan expanding its quality inspection department. Currently, Zhuanzhuan has three major quality inspection centers nationwide, with quality inspection staff accounting for more than half of all employees.

Zhuanzhuan optimized every process users encounter. All phones, cameras, and other products have identification numbers. When purchasing or selling on Zhuanzhuan, each product gets a QR code for comprehensive internal and external recording.

Currently, Zhuanzhuan has established three major quality inspection centers in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Qingdao nationwide, with nearly 3,000 door-to-door recycling quality inspection engineers.

By the end of 2024, Zhuanzhuan Group had applied for over 200 patents, with nearly 100 patent technologies related to quality inspection.

Hitting the brakes while speeding and spending 200 million yuan in one year also caused fluctuations in Zhuanzhuan's short-term financial statements. But Huang Wei believes that in the long term, this is the most crucial step in helping Zhuanzhuan complete its business loop.

**Betting on Super Offline Stores**

Although exiting the C2C battlefield, for Huang Wei, Zhuanzhuan's future remains within the second-hand industry, just no longer confined to the e-commerce platform table.

"After 10 years of entrepreneurship, I've completely changed industries," Huang Wei said.

While demystifying the second-hand C2C model, Huang Wei also gradually abandoned his obsession with internet traffic and began heavily investing in offline operations.

On June 9, 2025, Zhuanzhuan's first second-hand multi-category circular warehouse store "Super Zhuanzhuan" officially opened on the third floor of Beijing Friendship Store.

Each row of shelves in the store has about 3-5 levels, with luxury bags worth five figures no longer displayed as boutique items but arranged extremely compactly.

"Zhuanzhuan wants to create more consumption scenarios for users," Huang Wei believes that even luxury goods are essentially just merchandise.

Over 3,000 square meters of floor space, more than 200 categories, over 30,000 SKUs (stock keeping units), rows of stacked Hermès, LV, Chanel and other luxury bags, with photography equipment, shoes and clothing, watches, gaming cards, and other multi-categories all available.

Super Zhuanzhuan quickly broke through among consumers. According to Zhuanzhuan's announcement, during the trial period, the store consistently ranked first in clothing and footwear categories on Dianping for multiple months.

Zhuanzhuan's move from online to offline serves two purposes: second-hand luxury goods tend toward offline transactions, as consumers want to touch products and see sources before buying; and the second-hand luxury goods industry has enormous development potential with many industry pain points.

Global market research company IMARC Group data shows that in 2024, the global second-hand luxury goods market was worth $37.2 billion and is expected to reach $77.8 billion by 2033, with a compound annual growth rate of 8.5%.

China's domestic second-hand luxury goods industry is also becoming popular, with celebrities like Xiang Tai and Dong Jie, as well as live-streaming e-commerce companies like "Make Friends," selling second-hand luxury goods on Douyin.

Huang Wei has long planned entry into second-hand luxury goods. China's second-hand luxury industry commonly faces difficulties in standardization and unstable supply chains. Previously, the company with the largest supply chain scale in China's second-hand luxury market was Hongbulin.

In 2024, Zhuanzhuan acquired Hongbulin, gaining access to Hongbulin's supply chain and luxury goods authentication credentials, which was key to Super Zhuanzhuan's preliminary successful trial.

"Zhuanzhuan's bet on offline stores is a very good opportunity for offline-online integration. This cross-format approach is good for Zhuanzhuan. In the future, they could consider adding second-hand trading stores and counters in supermarkets — store-within-store is also a good opportunity," Zhuang Shuai analyzed.

Huang Wei understands that Zhuanzhuan is far from celebrating. But after 10 years of entrepreneurship, his passion remains, and employees' most common description of him is "youthful spirit."

In his spare time, Huang Wei loves watching youth-themed anime, and the company has conference rooms named after various anime, such as "Slam Dunk."

"No one thinks Sakuragi Hanamichi is a genius, but he's very passionate," Huang Wei said.