Hottest Opportunity For e-Retailers: Brazil

Brazil has at last been recognised as one of the hottest opportunities for e-retailers and payment platforms.

The latest figures show that just over 36 million people in Brazil (the country’s population is around 200 million) will buy products online in 2015. In short, shopping online has become a huge business.

Brazil is widely accepted now as the largest and most exciting e-Commerce market in LATAM. To put it into context, this one country has more online shoppers than Benelux and the Nordics combined. Total online sales for the year are expected to surpass $37bn, earning it the rank of tenth most valuable e-Commerce market in the world.

Brazil owes its position to not only macro-economic advantages (it has a huge population and vibrant economy), but also because it leads the region with an e-Commerce market which has a high degree of maturity. Also, it is keeping up with the times, with mobile device use high when it comes to buying online. Brazil boasts an average of more than one phone per capita. Therefore, of the 53% of Brazilians who will be using the internet by 2017, it is believed that almost all of these will be doing so via a mobile device.

Another crucial factor about Brazil’s dominance is the age of its population, with over 40% of its population aged between 25 and 54. What’s more, 85% of its people live in urban areas. This leads to demographics that e-retailers and payment platforms cannot ignore. Mine down further into the details and it turns out that nearly half of shoppers who venture online and are aged between 18 and 34, living in mostly the large urban zones. These include the southeast (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), the south (Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Florianópolis) and the northeast (Salvador and Recife).

As for what’s popular with online shoppers, household appliances (which have been popular for many years), have now been overtaken by fashion and accessories.

Interestingly, when it comes to payment, Brazil is at the forefront of pioneering digital currencies as a way of shopping online and research from a major accountancy firm shows that the majority (over 60%) of the population would be agreeable to using a digital currency, which beats Chinese shoppers (58% who are keen), the US (28%) and the UK (23%).

Another facet of the Brazilian e-Commerce market is that consumers expect to be able to pay by instalments. These account for 80% of all payments and can be spread across varying periods, from 3 to 12 months.

E-retailers also like Brazilian consumers, because when it comes to returning goods, they, at 15%, are well below the global average of 27%.

So, the message is clear for e-retailers and payment platforms, Brazil is not only one of the hottest opportunities in LATAM, it also is one of the most exciting prospects on a global basis.

About allpago

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allpago enables start-ups to Fortune 500 companies to offer the necessary local payment methods in the Latin American market, which account for around 80% of their revenues. Current clients include Art.com, Getty Images, Intel Security McAfee, Norton Symantec, Paylogic, Sumup, Teamviewer and many other leading payment and digital companies.

References: Information Age

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