Wednesday 15 August 2012

Waseem Saddique Marketing Services Provides An Insight Into Brazil’s Ecommerce Boom


Birmingham based marketing expert, Waseem Saddique, provides essential facts and figures that could help businesses to take advantage of Brazil’s current e-commerce boom.

As a nation, Brazil has experienced exponential growth in recent years, recently overtaking Britain as the world’s sixth largest economy. As the country continues its surge up the economic rankings, Latin America’s largest nation is now experiencing an e-commerce sales boom.

What’s encouraging for national and international businesses is that future e-commerce sales growth is likely to be highly driven by the power of social media and the mobile internet. Although Brazil has put itself on the map as an economic powerhouse, e-commerce had previously lagged behind other nations and the fact there is still room for the e-commerce market to grow.

Recent studies show that Brazil’s population is currently estimated to stand at around 195 million people; however, only 29 million people tend to make online retail purchases, leaving a potentially huge audience for businesses to market themselves towards.

In monetary terms, figures from 2011 show that e-commerce revenue streams reached R$19 billion dollars (or 3.9% of retail sales). In 2009 these figures stood at R$11 billion (or 2.7%), highlighting the substantial growth that e-commerce sales have witnessed.

Yet, despite such significant growth, the fact remains that the number of Brazilian internet users who consume goods online is still fewer than 40%. This is in stark contrast to nations such as Spain, where 66% of internet users purchase goods online and in Britain a whopping 81% of shoppers choose to buy goods using the web. The reality is that the online marketing opportunities in Brazil are massive.  

Predictions are already being made that mobile broadband penetration could reach 85% by the year 2015, offering a mass audience for online marketing, the likes of which Brazil has never seen. This will be a major platform for businesses to launch large-scale online marketing campaigns, through social media and mobile applications.

Many Brazilians are now quickly adapting to the growing trend of online social communication. Recent figures show that 87% of the Brazilian web audience are now signed up to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, the online marketing scope for businesses across the world looking to target the Brazilian e-commerce market is huge.

Waseem Saddique comments: “Arguably, more than anywhere else in the world, retailing is becoming much more social.”

Retail sources in Brazil have highlighted that around 30% of Brazil’s ‘online community’ actually ‘follow’ retailers via their e-commerce sites, Facebook pages or Twitter accounts. However, in countries such as Britain, just 12% engage in such activity.

On the whole, e-commerce retail analysts in Brazil have estimated that revenues have risen by a staggering 127% during the first quarter of 2012.