LATAM digital buyers will grow more than 20% by 2025
In the Latin American e-commerce sector there are around 300 million digital buyers, an amount that will grow by more than 20% by 2025.
In the Latin American e-commerce sector there are around 300 million digital buyers, an amount that will grow by more than 20% by 2025. And in that same year, online retail sales will be approximately 160 billion dollars.
These expectations not only apply to the countries that lead this activity in Latin America such as Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, but also markets such as Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Guatemala where the growth rate is expected to even reach 70 percent per year.
The German statistical portal Statista details that the expectation for 2025 is that the number of users of the e-commerce market will add another 4,800 million, this because after the pandemic consumers found in e-commerce a comfortable way to buy, worry-free, and they also discovered other advantages such as the possibility of finding better offers, making transactions anywhere and anytime or avoiding traffic.
In Latin America, several countries have followed this trend of establishing days, weekends or even entire weeks dedicated to promoting digital commerce. One of them has been Brazil, which in 2021 registered around US$ 21.4 billion in online retail sales. It is expected that by 2025, the electronic commerce of the South American country will grow by 30%, reaching US$ 27.8 billion.
In second place is Mexico, which in 2021 registered US$ 17.3 billion. By 2025, the Aztec country is expected to have an 11% growth in online sales.
Argentina could not be left behind, occupying third place, the South American nation reached US$6.1 million in retail sales. It is expected that in 2025 this sector will grow 59%, reaching US$9.7 billion.
Separately, in 2021, Colombia achieved online sales of US$5.6 billion. In 2025, that market is expected to rise to US$7.1 billion (26%).
Payment methods for digital purchases
The report The Global Payments Report 2022, prepared by FIS Worldapy, points out that traditional payment methods such as credit cards and cash are still widely used, but their participation in electronic commerce is gradually declining.
According to that study, in 2021 credit cards represented 39.3% of the value of transactions in Latin America. Debit transactions, for their part, represented 18.2% of the value of transactions in the region.
“The credit card continues as the first means of payment and digital wallets grow significantly and are strengthened as a growth tool for the region's economy. Mobile wallets in Latin America are expected to double in the 2021-2025 period, marking a new milestone on the path of consolidation of change in payment methods,” the report indicates.
Another trend shown in the report is the migration of consumers from cash and credit cards to BNPL (buy now, pay later) methods, which are beginning to gain ground in electronic commerce. Transaction values remain low (below 1%) but Latin America is projected to have the fastest BNPL growth rates of any region and will increase a projected 98% from 2021 to 2025, when it will represent an estimated 2.2% of the volume of sales of electronic commerce in the subcontinent.