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Selling online from North America to Latin America

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A grow­ing number of U.S. online retailers and consumer brand manufacturers are taking that challenge on by setting up shop and selling online in Latin America.

It wasn’t quite the same as graduating from the e-commerce school of hard knocks, but after six years of trial and error Tradercom USA Inc. has learned some valuable lessons about what works—and what doesn’t—in selling online in Latin America.

In 2006, Tradercom CEO Federico Torres set out to build an online retailing business in Latin America from a base in the U.S. To carve out a niche in Latin America’s growing business-to-consumer e-commerce market, which eMarketer estimates will grow about 110% from $29.70 billion in 2011 to $62.42 billion in 2016, Tradercom had ambitious plans to build a web store in multiple countries and offer steep discounts on well-known American products such as Fossil watches and Weber grills that are not always available through merchants in Latin America.

Latin America E-Commerce - Selling Online to Latin America

Latin America E-Commerce – Selling Online to Latin America

But selling online in a foreign country is never easy, especially in Latin America, a fast-growing and still-developing e-commerce arena where U.S. merchants face several substantial barriers to entry, including big tariffs and government red tape, sketchy local delivery options, and plenty of cultural differences. “There is a huge opportunity for U.S. web merchants such as us to develop a significant e-commerce business in Latin America, but there are significant challenges that we had to work our way through.” Torres says. “It took us a long time, lots of patience and a willingness to always try a new approach to build up a steady base of shoppers.”

Today Tradercom is an estab­lished and growing online retailing company. The e-retailer carries a web inventory of about 100,000 SKUs and sells online in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. Sales for the web-only retailer are on track to reach $8 million in 2012, double its 2011 sales.

Tradercom is one of a grow­ing number of U.S. online retailers and consumer brand manufacturers setting up shop and selling online in Latin America. The market already includes 25 U.S. companies ranked in the Top 300 Latin America, which in 2011 had combined web sales of $1.43 billion, up 32.4% from $1.08 billion in the prior year.

And more North American online retailers are seriously eyeing Latin America for a new interna­tional opportunity or expanding their existing base of operations. For example Apple Inc. (No. 11), which has been selling computer hardware online in Latin America for several years, in December 2011 launched an iTunes store with a catalog of 20 million song titles for Brazil and 15 other countries in Latin America.

Consumers in Latin America also are big fans of mobile commerce and social media, and looking to conve­niently shop online for the products they can’t find in local stores, says Kent Allen, principal and founder of The Research Trust, a San Francisco-based e-commerce and retailing industry research firm with clients in the U.S. and Latin America. “There’s only a handful of global e-commerce markets left where there are still lots of ground-floor opportunities to be the next category-killer web store, hot niche player or even the next Amazon, and that’s Latin America,” Allen says. “E-commerce in Brazil, Mexico and other parts of the region are still in an early growth stage and that’s attracting the attention of lots of U.S. merchants.”

Source: Internet Retailer

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#wordsofwisdom

Who are the Peruvians?

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A total of 519,000 Hispanics of Peruvian origin resided in the United States in 2008, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

A total of 519,000 Hispanics of Peruvian origin resided in the United States in 2008, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

A total of 519,000 Hispanics of Peruvian origin resided in the United States in 2008, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Peruvians in this statistical profile are people who self-identified as Hispanics of Peruvian origin; this means either they themselves are Peruvian immigrants or they trace their family ancestry to Peru. Peruvians are the tenth-largest population of Hispanic origin living in the United States, accounting for 1.1% of the U.S. Hispanic population in 2008. Mexicans constituted 30.7 million, or 65.7%, of the Hispanic population.1

This statistical profile compares the demographic, income and economic characteristics of the Peruvian population with the characteristics of all Hispanics and the U.S. population overall. It is based on Pew Hispanic Center tabulations of the 2008 American Community Survey. Key facts include:

• Immigration status. Seven-in-ten Peruvians (69.3%) in the United States are foreign born compared with 38.1% of Hispanics and 12.5% of the U.S. population overall. Two-thirds of immigrants from Peru (66.1%) arrived in the U.S. in 1990 or later. Four-in-ten Peruvian immigrants (42.3%) are U.S. citizens.

• Language. A majority of Peruvians (55.1%) speak English proficiently.2 Some 44.9% of Peruvians ages 5 and older report speaking English less than very well, compared with 37.3% of all Hispanics.

• Age. Peruvians are similar in age to the U.S. population and older than Hispanics overall. The median age of Peruvians is 35; the median ages of the U.S. population and all Hispanics are 36 and 27, respectively.

• Marital status. Peruvians are more likely than Hispanics overall to be married—50.7% versus 46.5%.

• Fertility. Two-in-ten Peruvian women (19.6%) ages 15 to 44 who gave birth in the 12 months prior to the survey were unmarried. That was less than the rate for all Hispanic women—38.8%—and the rate for U.S. women—34.5%.

• Regional dispersion. Peruvians are more geographically dispersed than other Hispanic origin groups. Two-in-ten Peruvians (19.8%) live in Florida and one-in-six (16.8%) live in California; some one-in-eight live in New Jersey (12.9%) and New York (12.3%).

• Educational attainment. Peruvians have higher levels of education than the Hispanic population overall. Some 29.8% of Peruvians ages 25 and older—compared with 12.9% of all U.S. Hispanics—have obtained at least a bachelor’s degree.

• Income. The median annual personal earnings for Peruvians ages 16 and older were $24,441 in 2008; the median earnings for all U.S. Hispanics were $21,488.

• Poverty status. The share of Peruvians who live in poverty, 9.5%, is lower than the rate of the general U.S. population (12.7%) and the rate among all Hispanics (20.7%).

• Health Insurance. Three-in-ten Peruvians (30.2%) do not have health insurance compared with 31.7% of all Hispanics and 15.4% of the general U.S. population. Additionally, 20.0% of Peruvians younger than 18 are uninsured.

• Homeownership. The rate of Peruvian homeownership (50.1%) is similar to the rate for all Hispanics (49.1%) but lower than the 66.6% rate for the U.S. population as a whole.
Percentages are computed before numbers are rounded.2 Peruvians ages 5 and older who report speaking only English at home or speaking English very well.Source: Pew Research Center