Over 200 Million Monthly Active Users, Idle Fish No Longer Accommodates Small and Medium-Sized Sellers
Many Idle Fish (Xianyu) users have complained about a drastic drop in traffic, with some reporting a decline from tens of thousands of views to only a few hundred. Some items remain with single-digit views even after being listed for days. While Idle Fish boasts over 600 million registered users and a daily GMV exceeding 1 billion yuan, a harsh reality is emerging: as the platform grows, it becomes increasingly difficult for ordinary sellers to gain visibility. Users feel the platform is stratifying, with traffic favoring professional sellers, search functionality frequently failing, and service fees continuously increasing, transforming the once free "decluttering" marketplace into a rapidly commercializing platform.
Letting idle items circulate – this was the original intention behind the creation of Idle Fish. Ten years ago, this platform, with its extremely low entry barrier, brought secondhand trading into people's lives. Ten years later, it has become a massive commercial machine with over 600 million registered users and a daily GMV exceeding 1 billion yuan.
According to the "2025-2026 Annual Core Trend Report" released by the third-party data agency QuestMobile, Idle Fish’s overall monthly active user base reached 217 million, a year-on-year increase of 19.64%. Its MAU growth rate ranked first among e-commerce apps, even surpassing Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), which is known for its community focus.
However, behind these impressive figures lies a harsh reality: the larger Idle Fish’s user base becomes, the more squeezed the space for ordinary sellers becomes. Some users also feel that Idle Fish’s user base is being stratified, with traffic accelerating towards professional sellers, search functionality frequently malfunctioning, and service fee thresholds being repeatedly raised – the once free cyber marketplace helping people "declutter" is rapidly accelerating down the path of commercialization.
And those who run the slowest are destined to be left behind.
Free Traffic is a Thing of the Past
“Traffic is very poor this year. Previously, the highest exposure was tens of thousands per day, but now there’s hardly any traffic, and without topping up, there are only a little over a thousand exposures.”
Liu Wei officially joined Idle Fish in 2024. He says that since the platform implemented fees, product exposure has almost entirely relied on paid promotion, and it’s difficult to gain traffic without topping up.
On Idle Fish, traffic for individual sellers seems to be disappearing. To cope with the depletion of organic traffic, the platform has launched more and more paid traffic tools, including Super Exposure and Super Polishing. The only way for sellers to gain exposure is almost exclusively by spending money.
A merchant specializing in digital products in Liu Wei’s professional seller exchange group revealed that the monthly amount spent on Super Exposure has now reached 6,000 yuan, compared to 3,000 yuan previously. He bluntly stated, “After topping up, monthly sales can reach 500,000 yuan, but without topping up, it’s only around 100,000 yuan.”
Cheng Hao, a professional seller with nine years of experience, told Phoenix Network Technology directly, “I won’t top up to buy exposure on the platform. My store’s orders have decreased significantly. The platform’s traffic logic is ‘money equals exposure,’ but it doesn’t assess the quality of the products and content themselves. My fellow veteran players and I are gradually shifting our focus to other platforms to reduce Idle Fish store weight.”
He helplessly said that small and medium-sized sellers are the most impacted. “Without investing in traffic, there is almost no room for survival. Many small and medium-sized sellers who were originally willing to operate for the long term are gradually losing confidence. This is a case of bad money driving out good.”
And when search is an important source of traffic, some sellers have found that products from professional sellers who pay for promotion occupy the vast majority of display positions, making it difficult for individual sellers’ goods to be retrieved.
For e-commerce platforms, search functionality is one of the most basic and core functions. Users come with a clear need and hope to quickly find the products they want through simple keyword searches.
However, the emergence of the “search generalization” problem not only affects the buyer’s shopping experience but also makes it more difficult for sellers’ products to be accurately matched.
A veteran user who has been on Idle Fish for ten years expressed her dissatisfaction to Phoenix Network Technology, “Isn’t search the most basic function? I can barely understand information flow ranked by payment priority, but I completely can’t understand search not displaying results.”
She further explained, “I did a test. If the product title contains two core keywords, A and B, searching for A alone or B alone results in the product not being found at all. I also changed other sellers’ products and did the same test, with the same results. Only by searching for both keywords A and B together can it be accurately identified.”
Even more perplexing is that the search results page on Idle Fish often displays products that are irrelevant to the search keywords. Some users complained, “Sometimes I scroll to the bottom of the page and still can’t find what I want.”
Commission Increase of Nearly 30%, Individual Sellers Can’t Handle It
“If I hadn’t seen related posts, I wouldn’t have known the fees had increased.” Xu Hui, a Yuxiaopu seller with 5 years of experience, told Phoenix Network Technology. He said, “The news about the fee increase was not announced to users in advance, nor was user consent sought. Even the announcement was issued secretly.”
Xu Hui is an individual seller who mainly sells secondhand anime merchandise. He joined Yuxiaopu three years ago. After the rate increase, he chose to exit Yuxiaopu.
Initially, the Idle Fish app claimed to be “permanently free.” In June 2023, it broke this principle for the first time and began charging a service fee of 1% for specific merchants with more than 10 transactions and a cumulative transaction amount exceeding 10,000 yuan in a given month.
In September of the following year, the charging scope expanded to all sellers, introducing a basic software service fee of 0.6%, with a maximum of 60 yuan per transaction, while retaining the tiered fee of 1% on excess amounts for high-frequency, high-value sellers.
“Yuxiaopu” is a professional seller certification service launched in 2022. After opening it, sellers can list up to 500 products instead of 50, enjoy features such as top placement and grouping, and receive traffic support from the platform. For sellers of a certain scale, Yuxiaopu is almost a necessity. Xu Hui bluntly said, “The services provided for sellers who don’t open Yuxiaopu are barely worth it.”
In less than two years, in early April of this year, Idle Fish updated the “Yuxiaopu Technical Service Fee Rules” without a large-scale official announcement, directly increasing the uniform rate of 0.6% to 1.6%, an increase of nearly three times, and without an upper limit.
After the news spread, many Yuxiaopu individual sellers chose to give up, saying, “1.6% commission is really too much, I’d rather not use it.”
In addition, many sellers reported that the Yuxiaopu closure process was cumbersome and posted seeking help, and tutorials on “how to successfully exit Yuxiaopu at once” also appeared in large numbers.
Xu Hui also mentioned his similar experience, saying that the process of exiting Yuxiaopu was not a one-step process. “You complete one task and then exit, the system prompts you to complete another task. You can’t cancel the top placement link, you need to remove the link before you can try to exit, and you can’t exit if there are unfinished orders.”
Xu Hui showed his backstage billing records, which showed that his previous commission amounts were mostly between a few yuan and a dozen yuan. He believes that reasonable fees are reasonable, after all, he has used related functions, but he cannot afford the fee increase in less than two years, “1.6% seems like only 1% more, but it’s an increase of 167%, almost three times. These small fees add up, which puts a lot of pressure on me, who originally had little profit.”
He mentioned, “I list low-priced items for sale, and scalpers list high-priced items. They buy traffic boosts, and I buy traffic boosts, resulting in a loss. People who need it can’t buy it at a low price, but the platform earns more commission.”
Another seller admitted that the fee increase has a smaller impact on professional sellers and a greater impact on individual sellers. “After all, professional sellers have high transaction amounts and can offset the commission costs by raising prices or lowering purchase prices. As long as there is still a profit margin, they won’t easily leave the platform.”
Community or Transaction?
According to data from iResearch Consulting, the scale of China’s secondhand e-commerce market is expected to exceed 1.5 trillion yuan in 2025. As the absolute leader in this track, Idle Fish’s commercial potential is undeniable.
But Idle Fish is not satisfied with this. At the end of 2023, Idle Fish was upgraded to a first-level business within the Taotian Group. Since then, Idle Fish has accelerated in multiple directions, including AI sales, dual-line layout (online + offline cycle stores), and the anime economy.
And unknowingly, it has taken on the responsibility of “supporting a family.” But on the path of rapid commercialization, it also shows deep contradictions.
In 2023, Idle Fish repeatedly emphasized that commercialization was not what it was pursuing at the moment, and the platform still emphasized user growth. At that time, Jishan, the general manager of Idle Fish, also told the media in an interview that Idle Fish was driven by “community + transaction.”
However, the logic of community and transaction is inherently twisted. The logic of community is trust, interaction, and human touch; the logic of transaction is commission, advertising, and conversion rate.
This balance is difficult to grasp, just like all community-based products, which always fail in e-commerce businesses. Xiaohongshu, which is known for its community activity, has always hovered around an internal unsatisfactory scale in terms of e-commerce GMV. While achieving revenue through commercialization, Idle Fish’s community foundation is also becoming murky.
Xu Hui bluntly said that Idle Fish has deviated from the original intention of the secondhand platform. “I have felt that there are more and more scalpers. Originally, it was to help everyone circulate idle items to those who need them, but now ordinary users are being squeezed out of a lot of space.”
He plans to find new software to replace it when his orders are completed, but he is frustrated by the lack of a suitable alternative platform at present, admitting that Idle Fish has a near monopoly in the secondhand market.
Whether to prioritize goods or people, will Idle Fish figure it out on its rapid journey? The answer has yet to surface.