Selling on Mercado Libre: The Ultimate Guide
A lot of ecommerce brands look to China to expand internationally while overlooking Latin America. But with the help of Latin America’s largest online retail platform Mercado Libre, brands can pivot to a less crowded market that offers an almost greenfield opportunity for growth.
In 2020, Latin America’s retail ecommerce sales grew by 36.7%. That’s higher than any other world region, including Asia-Pacific, which grew 26.4%, and North America, which grew 31.7%. Latin American countries also have some of the highest internet penetration rates in the world. Brazil’s is 68% and Mexico’s is 70%. Couple this with the fact that Mexico’s population is 127.6 million and Brazil’s is 212 million and the opportunities for growth here are undeniable.
In this article, we’ll go over the what, who, why, and how of Mercado Libre, so you can take full advantage of Latin America’s growing ecommerce market.
What is Mercado Libre?
Mercado Libre is Latin America’s largest ecommerce platform. The name Mercado Libre translates literally to “free market.” And it’s easy to see why. The ecommerce platform has 63 million active users across 18 different countries. It’s one of the top 10 most visited ecommerce sites in the world and as of the first quarter of 2021, it had 299.5 million live listings. It’s no wonder the platform is valued at 77.49 billion USD.
Since its founding in 1999, Mercado Libre has expanded to integrate different ecommerce services, including a shipping service (Mercado Envios), a payment platform (Mercado Pago), a credit line (Mercado Crédito), and an advertising program (Mercado Publicado). Together, these create a full ecommerce experience for Latin American consumers.
So why sell on Mercado Libre? For one, Mercado Libre helps you establish brand awareness outside the US. Latin America is close enough that the low cost barrier to enter makes it an attractive opportunity for taking your brand into the global marketplace. Plus, you’ll benefit from more incremental sales and revenue. Mercado Libre customers overlap less with customers on other ecommerce platforms than, say, Amazon customers do with Walmart Marketplace customers. So you’ll get more from joining Mercado Libre as a seller.
How to sell on Mercado Libre
Mercado Libre is open to US sellers through its cross-border Global Selling Program. With it, you can sell to customers in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Columbia from one account. But keep in mind, the Global Selling Program is invite only. That means you’ll need to apply to join. To apply, you’ll just need some basic information, including your business’s website URL and its monthly sales in USD.
Listing products on Mercado Libre
Once your application is approved, you can start listing products on your Seller account with an excel spreadsheet template or an application programming interface (API). Just be careful not to list any restricted products. Mercado Libre provides a detailed list of restricted products by product category, where you’ll find that restrictions vary by country and fulfillment type.
While listing products is free, selling items comes with selling fees. When you make a sale, Mercado Libre takes a percentage cut that varies by product category and country. Each country also has different minimum listing prices. That means you can’t sell products below a certain price threshold. Try bundling smaller items into a larger package if you need to bump the price over the minimum listing price.
Payment on Mercado Libre
Mercado Libre customers have different payment options. One of the most popular is interest-free installment plans. Bear this in mind as you’ll be required to offer it. Other payment options include mobile Point of Sale (mPOS), digital wallet QR payments, prepaid cards, and credit.
What about different currencies? Fortunately, Mercado Libre has you covered. They allow you to set listing prices in USD and get paid in USD. The platform automatically converts your listings’ USD prices into your customers’ local currency. That way, you don’t have to worry about exchange rates and so on. Just process everything in USD from start to finish. You can withdraw your earnings every 2 weeks if they amount to at least $500. If not, you’ll have to wait until you reach this amount to withdraw. You can transfer payments to a Payoneer account or directly to your bank account.
Language translation on Mercado Libre
In addition to taking care of currency conversions, Mercado Libre softens the language barrier for you with an automated translation tool. It lets you communicate with Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking customers in English by handling all the translation work behind the scenes. This is a great feature that takes some of the stress out of expanding into new countries and foreign markets.
Shipping and logistics on Mercado Libre
When it comes to shipping your products to Latin America, you have two options:
First, you can take advantage of Mercado Envios Full, a comprehensive fulfillment service similar to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS). It allows you to store your inventory in Mercado Libre warehouses and handles the entire logistics process, including picking, packaging, and shipping. What’s more, Mercado Envios Full is free with the avoidable exceptions of long-term storage and pickup stock fees.
Second, if you’d rather ship your products to customers directly, you can choose Mercado Envios Direct to consumers. It partners with international carriers DHL and MailAmericas. Just bear in mind that both carriers have different package size and weight restrictions. With this fulfillment option, your Seller account automatically generates a shipping label when an order is placed. Print the label and attach it to the order, which you’ll need to ship to DHL or MailAmericas within 3 business days. They’ll then deliver the product to the buyer within their own shipping time frames.
Tips for successfully selling on Mercado Libre
Now that you know how to sell on Mercado Libre, let’s go over how to be successful on the platform. Mercado Libre marketplace has a Seller Reputation System that measures your seller performance and quality along a color scale from red (low) to green (high). To stay in the green, you’ll need to reply to customers within 24 hours, minimize the number of quality complaints your products get, keep order cancellations under 3%, and handle shipments within 3 days.
If you perform well on Seller Reputation metrics, you’ll rank higher on the platform’s search engine results pages (SERPs) and you could save up to 60% in shipping costs. In fact, we’ve found Seller Reputation to be the number one driver of search engine optimization (SEO) on Mercado Libre. For example, we researched the keyword “bomber jacket” and found that the top result had fewer reviews and was twice as expensive as the other top five listings. What made the difference? The top listing’s seller had the highest Seller Reputation. So score high on your Seller Reputation if you really want to give your listings a boost.
Mercado Libre also offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to help you increase your sales. So far, the advertising tool is pretty simple, but it can help you attract new customers. Users will see your ads in search results and on product pages as sponsored ads.
Partnering with Pattern
Ultimately, success on Mercado Libre comes with experience. If you need help expanding into the Latin American ecommerce marketplace, Pattern can help. Our marketplace experts have helped brands successfully launch products online into Mexico and Brazil, for example. We’ve also specialized in shipping health and beauty products following the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency ANIVISA’s strict import regulations. We know all the ins and outs of Latin American ecommerce.
Plus, our brand management helps brands grow revenue by an average of 30% in their first year. We can do this by analyzing which of your products would make a good fit for the Latin American market, providing estimates on annual revenue and potential duties, taxes, and non-tariff barriers, and giving you strategies on gaining market share in your product’s category. Learn more about Mercado Libre in our on-demand webinar or Request a demo of our ecommerce acceleration platform today.
More Resources
Accelerate Your Marketplace Presence—Mercado Libre
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Going Beyond Amazon: How to Break into Other Ecommerce Marketplaces
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Accelerate Your International Presence—China
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Sept 22, 2022
How an Amazon SEO Agency Should Be Serving Your Brand
If you’re in the global ecommerce space, you are most likely aware of Amazon, and probably selling your products on the marketplace. With over $470 billion in sales in 2021 alone, Amazon stands as the third largest company in the world based on revenue. The ecommerce giant is a household name in the U.S. and working hard to grow its market share across five continents worldwide.
Having your products available on Amazon and being competitive there, though, are definitely two different things. If you want to really succeed on Amazon, you’ll need specialized insight into how Amazon works and how to make it work for you. So, for many brands, it’s a great idea to work with an Amazon Search Engine Optimization (SEO) agency.
At Pattern, Amazon SEO optimization service is one of our key competencies. We understand that technology, data-driven insights and expertise are the most important tools brands can leverage to win top listing spots on digital marketplaces. With expert teams and years of experience, we help brands conquer the Profitability Death Spiral as they compete with other products and sellers online. We offer Amazon SEO agency services as a core solution to brands that need more resources to get ahead.
What is an Amazon SEO Agency?
An Amazon SEO agency serves brands by improving their products’ rank and listing performance on Amazon. They make strategic decisions about ad spending and placement that lead to higher traffic, conversions, and revenue for ecommerce brands.
A great Amazon SEO Agency partner will:
Prioritize Your Success
Unfortunately, many Amazon SEO agencies profit in unfair ways from your brands’ perceived success based on the ROAS numbers they provide. This is done through including branded search terms in ROAS reports, which naturally skew listing performance.
Let’s say, for instance, your brand is called “Annie’s” and you sell lollipops. Your brand has a very high likelihood of winning the top listing spots on Amazon for lollipop search terms that are paired with “Annie’s,” your brand name. So, SEO agencies will spend your ad money on those terms and report a very high ROAS.
To avoid scenarios like these, it’s best to look for an agency that either calculates their profits on metrics other than your ROAS scores or weighs branded search terms differently in the performance metrics reports. Regardless of your Amazon SEO agency’s cost structure, you should align onbranded search terms before committing to a scope of work.
Provide Detailed Competitive Insight
A great indicator of a high-quality Amazon SEO agency is the level of insight they can provide into your competitors’ listing positioning and how it compares to yours. Data fanaticism is so important at Pattern that we’ve developed proprietary technology to display this exact information with precise detail for every brand we work with. In fact, you can find our free version here to see how you compare to some of your top competitors based on ASIN.
It’s certainly possible to improve your Amazon search performance with blind spending strategies. But a truly great solution will help you to know where your dollars are at their most powerful and competitive.
Reduce Your Ad Spend Over Time
Amazon’s A10 algorithm prioritizes customer satisfaction—it wants to show consumers the best products that align with their search intent to improve conversions and sales. So, the best way to gain momentum on Amazon is to work on incremental wins.
Improving your performance on more obscure search terms that align with your customers’ search intent is a great way to increase ROAS for the long term. A10 will reward your success with better rankings on higher-volume search terms and the virtuous cycle can help you conquer your most-coveted listing spots. And the best part? This process of gaining momentum, if done right, will naturally decrease your ad spend over time as Amazon recognizes your value and works with you to keep your products at the top of consumers’ search results.
Amazon SEO Optimization and More
As an Amazon SEO specialist, Pattern knows how to help your brand win better success for long-term profitability on Amazon. With our data-driven tools and brilliant teams of ecommerce experts, we help brands with listing management, content optimization, Amazon ad strategies, and more.
Contact us to learn more about our SEO optimization services.
Sept 20, 2022
4 Ecommerce Marketplace Consultant Must-Haves
Entering the ecommerce landscape is a huge undertaking for any brand—it usually requires a large investment in resources and expertise to really be successful. Any brand can quickly get in over their heads trying to navigate the nuances of SEO, fulfillment and logistics, distribution control, listing optimization, and meeting the numerous other requirements and administrative tasks to show up well on marketplaces.
Unfortunately, because it’s so easy for third party, gray market, and unauthorized sellers to obtain and sell products online, many brands find themselves pressured to execute an ecommerce plan without the right resources to succeed on marketplaces and their other channels.
So, for brands looking to enter the ecommerce space or improve their current and future performance, it makes sense to partner with an ecommerce consultant.
Pattern’s global presence and proven success with hundreds of brands has allowed us to develop highly effective ecommerce consulting services. We can guide your brand to navigate issues both large and small in marketplaces worldwide. To maximize your ecommerce efforts, you’ll need to understand what an ecommerce consultant does and how to select one who drives the right value for your brand and products.
What is an Ecommerce Consultant?
An ecommerce consultant is a specialist in the ecommerce space who can give you personalized guidance on how to market your products and grow their presence on digital marketplaces.
An ecommerce consultant should be able to analyze your brand, audience, category, opportunity, and current roadblocks and help you understand how to utilize your resources (or what resources are missing) to be most effective in capturing your opportunities in the ecommerce space.
Not sure how to evaluate a consultant? Here are 4 key attributes to look for as you make your choice.
1. Brand Obsession/Specialization/Passion
At Pattern, we prioritize brand obsession for a reason—we know that a brand-centered mindset makes a crucial difference in the outcomes and results our partners achieve. So in our experience, when you begin your search for an ecommerce consultant, it’s important to look for a partner who is specialized in ecommerce, invested in the product, and passionate about helping brands build and improve their strategies. Typically, this means finding someone that consults exclusively for ecommerce marketplaces, rather than choosing a consultant who offers many different services.
2. Proven Results
It’s also important to avoid choosing a consulting partner who can’t deliver the right experience for your brand. The best indication of whether your potential consultant can do that is to review their history, data, and results with other brands. Ask if they’ve helped others in your selling category, if they’ve solved specific issues your brand is facing, and why they feel you are a good fit. The key is to leave the conversation feeling confident that you understand your consultants’ capabilities and whether or not they match up with your needs.
3. Wide Range of Marketplace Expertise
It’s best to pick a consultant who knows how to guide a brand onto and through multiple marketplaces worldwide. You’ll want to take a look at your long-term strategy and think about the regions and platforms you’re currently on and where you might want to take your brand in the future. If your consultant is truly great at what they do, they’ll be able to help you perform well enough with your current product roadmap that it’ll be a no-brainer to expand your presence at the right time.
4. Network of Resources
The most effective partnership with an ecommerce consultant will be able to give you both recommendations and point you to solutions for making those changes in your planning, processes, and execution. Your time and money is valuable, so you want to make sure that you’re spending it as efficiently as possible as you follow your consultant’s advice. So, before you commit to an ecommerce consultant, ask about the resources and concrete solutions they typically recommend to the brands they work with.
Achieve Your Ecommerce Goals With Pattern
Finding an ecommerce consultant that checks the boxes can be a difficult task. At Pattern, our entire focus and drive centers around giving brands the tools and resources they need to succeed on domestic and international ecommerce marketplaces.
With over 100 global ecommerce consultants across 10 global offices, we have the right tools to partner with brands across the world to achieve better ecommerce success. We give specialized advice, then make sure our partners have all the adequate SEO, social media, CRM, Amazon multi-channel fulfillment services, and ecommerce outsourcing services they need.
Interested in ecommerce consulting services? Set up a call here to learn what Pattern can do for your brand on global marketplaces.