This article was published in 2026 and references a historical event from 2021, included here for context and accuracy.
- Tension: Latin American businesses discovered that the most sophisticated commerce happens where customers already spend their time, not where platforms want them to go.
- Noise: E-commerce experts insist successful retail requires dedicated apps and websites while ignoring how actual transactions happen in emerging markets.
- Direct Message: Commerce infrastructure doesn’t create customer relationships; it either supports the conversations people are already having or gets bypassed entirely.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
When Mercately’s co-founder Henry Remache told an Ecuadorian client in 2021 to focus their entire sales operation on WhatsApp, conventional e-commerce wisdom said this was backwards.
Build a proper online store first, the advice went. Invest in your website. Create a branded app experience. WhatsApp was supposed to be a support channel, not the main event.
That client generated 90% of their sales through WhatsApp conversations within months. Not because they had revolutionary products or exceptional marketing, but because they stopped fighting where their customers actually wanted to transact business.
Five years later, as Mercately processes transactions for over 1,000 companies across 20 countries and WhatsApp reaches 600 million users across Latin America, the platform’s dominance reveals something uncomfortable about how North American and European commerce models get exported to emerging markets. We keep building infrastructure for how we think commerce should work rather than observing how it actually happens.
Where customer behavior meets platform expectations
The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create Latin America’s WhatsApp commerce boom. It exposed a tension that already existed: the gap between what global e-commerce platforms assumed customers needed and what those customers were actually doing.
When lockdowns hit Brazil and Chile in 2020, businesses scrambled to establish “proper” online stores with shopping carts, checkout flows, and payment gateways. Meanwhile, their customers were already buying everything from groceries to electronics through WhatsApp conversations with neighborhood shops. The pandemic accelerated this existing behavior rather than creating it.
This isn’t about technological sophistication. Brazil has robust digital payment systems. Chile’s internet infrastructure rivals developed nations. The preference for conversational commerce through WhatsApp reflects something deeper: a fundamental difference in how trust gets established before money changes hands.
In markets where credit card penetration remains below 40% and fraud concerns run high, the personal relationship preceding a transaction matters more than the slickness of the checkout experience. A WhatsApp conversation with a real person who answers questions, sends product photos, and negotiates payment terms builds the confidence that a polished website cannot.
Yet e-commerce platforms keep optimizing for the wrong variables. They improve page load times and streamline checkout flows while customers abandon carts to message businesses directly on WhatsApp.
The friction isn’t in the technology. It’s in the assumption that efficient transactions matter more than relationship-building conversations.
How conventional commerce wisdom creates blind spots
The noise surrounding conversational commerce comes from confusing infrastructure complexity with customer value.
Venture-backed e-commerce platforms tout their technological sophistication: AI-powered recommendations, one-click purchasing, seamless omnichannel experiences. These features solve problems that matter intensely in developed markets with high credit card adoption and established online shopping habits.
They solve almost nothing for a Brazilian clothing retailer whose customers want to negotiate bulk discounts through voice messages. Or a Chilean electronics shop whose buyers need payment plans arranged through personal conversation. The sophisticated infrastructure becomes noise, obscuring what actually facilitates transactions.
Industry analysis compounds this distortion by measuring e-commerce growth through traditional metrics. Online retail sales figures track purchases through formal e-commerce platforms while missing the massive volume of transactions happening through messaging apps.
When analysts declare Latin American e-commerce “underdeveloped” compared to North American markets, they’re often measuring the wrong thing entirely.
The pandemic created another layer of distortion. Media coverage framed the shift to online shopping as Latin American markets “catching up” to developed economies. This narrative missed that many businesses weren’t adopting e-commerce platforms at all. They were scaling the conversational commerce they’d practiced for years, just moving it from in-person to WhatsApp.
Even success stories get misinterpreted. When Mercately raised $2.6 million in seed funding from Inventus Capital Partners in 2022, coverage positioned them as an e-commerce enablement platform.
The more accurate framing: they built infrastructure that doesn’t fight against how transactions naturally happen in their market. Their integration with Stripe and HubSpot matters less than their recognition that the conversation is the commerce.
What commerce infrastructure actually serves
Commerce platforms that demand customers adapt to predetermined transaction flows will always lose to infrastructure that adapts to existing customer behavior.
This isn’t an endorsement of WhatsApp specifically or messaging-based commerce generally. It’s recognition that successful transaction infrastructure makes existing customer preferences easier rather than trying to reshape those preferences around platform capabilities.
Mercately’s growth to $1.5 million in annual revenues across fragmented markets with fluctuating currencies demonstrates this principle. Their AI-powered customer engagement tools and inventory management don’t create a new commerce experience. They remove friction from the conversational transactions businesses were already conducting manually.
Rethinking commerce infrastructure from customer behavior
The lessons from Latin America’s WhatsApp commerce boom extend beyond emerging markets.
As Mercately expands into the U.S. market with their seed funding, they’re discovering that conversational commerce isn’t exclusively an emerging market phenomenon. It’s what happens whenever relationship-building matters more than transaction efficiency.
High-consideration purchases, complex service offerings, and products requiring customization all benefit from conversation over optimization. A luxury furniture retailer in Miami found that customers buying $10,000 sofas preferred negotiating details through WhatsApp rather than completing online purchase forms.
The message wasn’t less sophisticated. It was more appropriate for how trust gets built around expensive decisions.
The competitive advantage shifts from whoever builds the most sophisticated platform to whoever best supports how customers naturally want to transact.
This requires different questions: Where do our customers already communicate? What relationship needs to exist before they’re comfortable buying? What friction are we creating by forcing platform adoption rather than meeting people where they are?
For Latin American businesses, this clarity came from necessity. Limited resources meant they couldn’t build elaborate e-commerce infrastructure even if they wanted to. They had to work with existing customer behavior rather than trying to change it. That constraint produced better results than well-funded attempts to import “proper” e-commerce models.
The broader implication challenges how commerce infrastructure gets developed globally. Instead of building platforms and hoping customers adapt, successful approaches observe actual transaction patterns and reduce friction within those existing behaviors.
Sometimes the most sophisticated commerce technology is the one that gets out of the way of human conversation entirely.
