In recent years, the growth of Latin American markets has a key factor: electronic commerce. The report “Latin America Ecommerce Forescast 2021” carried out by Insider Intelligence points out that before the pandemic the ecommerce was in the early stages of adoption, but in 2020, retailers and consumers turned to it, boosting sales by 63.3 percent and making the region the main driver for growth. ecommerce with an overall development of 65.2 percent. However, the opportunities for different sizes of businesses are still skewed. Thus, the brands They are following a trend: supporting entrepreneurs.
Big brands bet on entrepreneurs
That entrepreneurs and / or SMEs make use of digital technologies and share the message of the digital sale of goods and services is no longer just an option for large companies, but a strategic step on the way to boost growth in Mexico. That is why brands like like eBay and Mercado Libre, they have decided to encourage SMEs from various countries, including Mexico, to get involved in electronic commerce.
In April 2020, eBay launched the “My business 24/7” program, this is an export business accelerator to support micro, small and medium-sized companies in Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Chile and Brazil. Information provided by eBay indicates that in the region 800 businesses were registered to the initiative and in Mexico there were more than 200 businesses, which received their benefits.
The launch has responded to the need that many businesses have faced various challenges as a result of the pandemic and are looking for “new alternatives to continue generating income and stay afloat, not only in the face of the situation, but also everything that is going to come after the pandemic ends ”, says Raúl Bustamante.
Adding the objective that more SMEs join the platform and have the possibility of exporting in an accelerated manner, so as not to depend solely on the Mexican market. Due to the success in its first stage, eBay announced a couple of weeks ago the launch of the second round of the program in Mexico, Peru and Colombia.
For its part, Mercado Libre decided to help more than 150 thousand businesses in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil by making Mercado Crédito and Mercado Shops available to them, so that SMEs have simple and efficient tools to obtain a benefit from the digital economy in a time of crisis.
Alejandro Caballero, Director of the Mercado Libre México Marketplace, comments in an exclusive interview with Merca 2.0 that in the first report they had they closed around 10,000 SMEs, but in the same period they registered between 8,000 and 10,000, that from end of March to September 2020. A figure that triggers the success of this strategy in its turnover is that it contributed 27 percent and derived from the digital transformation, 57 percent of SMEs have managed to sustain most of their collaborators and even 6 percent increased them.
Entrepreneurs are having many alternatives to professionalize in the ecommerce And they must take them, as those who are not participating in the new economic dynamics, or who cannot, could find themselves on the disadvantaged side of a possibly persistent digital divide as the digital transformation evolves.
It is clear that in recent years the adoption of digital transformation in entrepreneurial businesses in Mexico has increased, but definitely 2020 and 2021 will go down in history as one of the years with the highest growth in electronic commerce in Latin America, which largely depended on A measure of the increase in the share of mobile devices in sales in the region and the growth of digital buyers, since in the first year of the pandemic, Insider Intelligence estimated 38 million new buyers.
With physical store closings, along with government lockdowns, they hurt and in turn gave entrepreneurial businesses an opportunity to experience digital commerce.
With resilience, in Mexico, 46.1% of SMEs adopted internet sales as a permanent operational measure against Covid-19, which will allow them to be more competitive in the future.
See more: