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Connected Retail: Strengthening Unified Commerce Across Latin America

By Freedom251 Team · · 7 min read

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Connected retail links the channels where customers discover and buy products with the systems that manage availability, orders, payments, fulfillment, and service. For retailers in Latin America, the practical challenge is not simply adding an app, marketplace, or payment method: it is making the customer’s chosen route to purchase work reliably in each market. The right approach depends on local shopping behavior, infrastructure, regulation, logistics, and retailer capabilities—not on a single regional blueprint.

Why connected retail matters to Latin American retailers

Customers may move between a store, a website, an app, a marketplace, or a messaging conversation during one purchase journey. If those channels use disconnected product, inventory, payment, or service information, convenience at the front end can create confusion behind it: an item appears available but cannot be fulfilled, a promotion does not carry across channels, or a payment requires manual reconciliation.

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“Unified commerce” is a useful name for coordinating these customer-facing and operational activities, but the sources cited here do not establish one formal definition for the region. The useful test is operational: can the retailer maintain dependable information and handoffs from product discovery through ordering, payment, fulfillment, and support?

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What the shopper evidence says—and what it does not

Kantar’s 2024 Omnichannel Report describes 25 billion consumer-goods purchases across 131 million Latin American households navigating an omnichannel landscape. It reports that its “camaleonic” shoppers use an average of six channels and seek value across stores and online channels. Kantar also reports nearly 2 million new online shoppers and a 20% increase in average transaction value alongside regional ecommerce growth. These are figures from Kantar’s report; they do not establish that adding channels caused the transaction-value increase or that every shopper uses six channels.

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The business implication is to learn which channels serve which customers and purchase missions in the retailer’s actual market. A shopper might research online and buy in a store, reorder through a B2B marketplace, or ask a question through messaging before purchasing. A channel plan should reflect those behaviors rather than treating every channel as equally important.

What a connected operating model needs to join up

Discovery and ordering

Customers should be able to find products and place orders through the channels the retailer chooses to support. The product description, price, promotion, and order status need to be clear enough that a customer is not forced to restart the purchase when moving between channels.

Inventory and availability

Inventory information should help the retailer make credible availability promises. The relevant question is not whether every channel shows a live stock count; it is whether the information and update process are reliable enough for the promise being made, including any limits on store, warehouse, or supplier stock visibility.

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Fulfillment and service

Ordering needs to connect to the process that gets the goods to the customer or retailer. Store pickup, delivery, shipment tracking, returns, and customer support are different operating choices, but each depends on clear ownership of the order and usable status information. If a handoff depends on staff manually copying details between systems, include that workload and its failure points in the design.

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Promotions, pricing, and payment

Promotions and prices need deliberate rules across channels and locations; “consistent” does not necessarily mean identical where local pricing or channel economics differ. Payment integration likewise means more than displaying additional methods at checkout. Mastercard’s 2024 retail discussion notes that a wider range of payment options can increase reconciliation complexity. Retailers need to know how each payment is authorized, settled, recorded, refunded, and matched to an order.

Latin America is a regional frame, not one operating environment

Digital trade depends on conditions that differ among countries and businesses. The World Trade Organization’s regional overview identifies market openness, digital regulation, infrastructure and connectivity, cross-border payments, logistics and trade facilitation, firm capabilities, skills, and access to finance as enabling or constraining factors. The IDB, World Bank, and WTO’s September 2026 report also emphasizes country-specific roadmaps. These are useful checks for a retail plan, not a country-by-country readiness ranking.

Payments illustrate why local detail matters. The Central Bank of Chile’s 2024 South American Payments Systems Report covers observed payment-use patterns, interoperability by country, central-bank innovation projects, and an initial evaluation of cross-border payments. It follows an agreement among the central-bank governors of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. It supplies South American payments context, not a complete account of every Latin American market.

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Separate regional digital-trade figures from retail-market figures. The IDB, World Bank, and WTO report says exports of digitally delivered services in Latin America and the Caribbean rose from US$18.5 billion in 2005 to US$87.7 billion in 2024, representing 2% of the global total. These are service exports, not retail ecommerce sales. The report’s scenario of up to 7.9% annual growth through 2040 is conditional on technological progress and an improved policy environment, not a baseline forecast for retail.

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Small-retailer digitization: useful examples, not a universal prescription

Mastercard’s 2024 retail article describes convenience, price, product fit, and immediacy as influences on online and offline shopping. It gives examples of B2B tools intended to support small retailers:

Example What Mastercard describes Geographic scope stated in the article
Compra Agora A Brazil-based B2B marketplace with ordering, stock and shipment tracking, pricing, promotions, extended payment terms, and cashless payments. Brazil
BEES A B2B ecommerce and SaaS platform with product browsing, orders, rewards, deliveries, invoices, and business insights. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay

These are examples as described by Mastercard, not independent product evaluations or endorsements. Their features illustrate possible ways to connect ordering and retailer support; they do not establish that either platform fits a particular retailer’s systems, costs, or market.

In an April 8, 2025 publication, Mastercard identified B2B ecommerce platforms, conversational commerce through instant messaging, B2B marketplaces, embedded credit, and instant digital payments as emerging trends in consumer packaged goods (CPG). It also recommends mobile-friendly digital infrastructure, financial inclusion, digital training and adoption, personalized retail partnerships, and ecosystem collaboration. Those are Mastercard’s recommendations, not a proven implementation formula.

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How large is the payment-digitization opportunity?

Mastercard’s 2025 study estimates a US$448.4 billion digital-payment opportunity. Its scope includes 11 Latin America and Caribbean countries and the United States, so the figure should not be read as a Latin America-only retail market size. The study’s research took place from October 2024 through January 2025 and included public-source review and 12 in-depth interviews.

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In the surveyed countries, Mastercard’s cited whitepaper describes nearly 12 million traditional-trade retailers with US$362 billion in B2C sales, and says 43% of transactions are still conducted in cash. It estimates that 90% of B2B payments—US$293.4 billion—are handled in cash, checks, or bank transfers. These are Mastercard figures for its stated study scope, not a census of all Latin American retailers.

Mastercard quotes Walter Pimenta, executive vice president, Commercial and New Payment Flows, LAC: “The digitalization of payments in the traditionally cash-heavy trade sector represents one of the most significant untapped opportunities in the CPG industry today”. This is an industry executive’s view, not an independent finding.

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A decision framework for choosing channels and systems

There is no source-supported head-to-head comparison of retail platforms or proof of a universal return on investment. Use the following questions to compare an operating approach against the retailer’s target market and use case. They are a practical framework derived from the regional constraints described above, not a published scoring model.

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Decision area Questions to answer
Shopper and channel fit Which channels do target customers actually use? Which purchase missions—discovery, urgent replenishment, planned purchase, or repeat ordering—does each channel serve?
Payment fit Which local payment choices matter? How will authorization, settlement, refunds, reconciliation, interoperability, and any cross-border requirements work?
Operational continuity Can ordering, inventory visibility, fulfillment, promotions, and customer service exchange reliable information? Which handoffs remain manual?
Market readiness What do connectivity, regulation, logistics, staff skills, and access to finance permit in the specific country and business?
Adoption and cost Can staff and smaller retail partners use the system consistently? Do training, support, and added operating costs make sense for businesses with thin margins?

Evaluate the answers by market rather than assuming a regional rollout will behave uniformly. A system that supports more channels may also add integration, training, support, and reconciliation work. Those operating costs and dependencies belong in the comparison alongside customer reach.

A practical implementation sequence

  1. Map journeys and systems. For one customer group and market, document how customers discover, order, pay, receive goods, and get help. Record which systems and teams handle each step, including manual workarounds.
  2. Find the costly or confusing handoffs. Identify where availability becomes unreliable, orders are re-entered, payment records do not match orders, or service teams lack status information. Prioritize a specific friction point rather than digitizing every process at once.
  3. Choose a bounded use case. Select one market, customer journey, and channel or operational problem. Check local payment, regulatory, connectivity, fulfillment, and staff-readiness requirements before choosing tools.
  4. Connect the needed information and responsibilities. Define which system owns product, price, inventory, order, payment, and fulfillment status; how updates move; and who handles exceptions. Establish the process for refunds, unavailable items, failed payments, and delayed fulfillment.
  5. Measure customer and operational outcomes. Track measures relevant to the chosen use case, such as order completion, unavailable-item incidents, fulfillment time, payment reconciliation exceptions, repeat orders, or support contacts. Set a baseline and compare it with the same market and process after the change; do not assume an improvement before measuring it.
  6. Adapt before expanding. Review staff and partner adoption, actual costs, and exception handling. Adjust the design to local conditions before extending it to other channels or countries.

What connected retail does not guarantee

Adding a channel or accepting another payment method does not, by itself, create unified commerce. Nor do the cited sources establish a country-by-country readiness ranking, a winning vendor, or a proven sales or ROI lift from unified-commerce investment. The decision is whether a specific combination of channels, systems, and processes can serve the retailer’s customers while remaining workable under that market’s operating conditions.

Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.

connected retailDigital PaymentsLatin Americaomnichannel retailRetail Technologyunified commerce

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