Latin America is currently the region with the fastest growing Internet population in the world. As of 2018. Latin America is the fourth largest regional online market, after Asia, Europe and Africa. In 2018, the number of Internet users in Latin America was approximately 378 million, with an Internet penetration rate of 60%, an increase of nearly 100 million from 2013.
The increasing popularity of smartphones is generally considered to be one of the main driving forces for the growth of the Latin American e-commerce market. Latin American smartphone users are mainly concentrated in 6 countries: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Peru. At the end of 2018, smartphone penetration in Latin America was 63%, and this number is expected to rise to 79% in 2023.
In the past 10 years, middle-class incomes in Latin America have doubled, and purchasing power is growing rapidly across the region. According to monitoring data from the “Network Economic Society E-Commerce Research Center”, in 2018, online transaction volume in Latin America reached US$71.2 billion, a year-on-year increase of 15%. Cooper Smith, a senior research analyst at BI Intelligence, has analyzed the e-commerce market in Latin America and predicts that by 2021, the scale of e-commerce in Latin America will reach US$118 billion.