Latin America Ecommerce Opportunities Case Study

I wrote a case study about a small ecommerce test that my friends and I ran for a few years in Chile. This post is most applicable to smaller countries like Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador and Peru, but also has some good information for Mexico, Colombia and Argentina. Brazil is a different story. Hopefully my case study on Latin American ecommerce opportunities is helpful. The spanish version appeared in Pousta with the name Conversamos sobre cómo montar tienda online con alguien que aprendió DEMASIADO al respecto. From the link:

In late 2012, I met up with two ex startup chile friends over beers. Like most beery conversations between entrepreneurs, the conversation devolved into new business ideas. All three of us had seen ecommerce’s steady growth in Chile and were certain that it would continue to grow toward levels seen in other developed markets. After a few more beers, one of us said, “why don’t we just start a small ecommerce business, it’s the best way to learn about the market and see where the real opportunities are.”That conversation led to more conversations and we got serious about launching a small ecommerce business to really get a handle on the market. But what product should we sell? And how would we validate the market to know if the product we wanted to sell made sense? And how would we do it without spending huge amounts of money?I’m writing this post to shed light into our thought process and to show how we validated our ecommerce business without spending a single dime (peso in this case) for two reasons:

1. To give an overview of Chilean (and Latin American) ecommerce opportunities
2. To help other entrepreneurs think about how they can validate their own ideas without spending months and thousands of dollars buying inventory, developing software and wasting time on unimportant things.

By now, almost all entrepreneurs know about lean startup methodology and try to use it, but the how remains mysterious to a high percentage of entrepreneurs. I hope this post is useful.

You can read the rest of my Latin American ecommerce case study on my blog.