One of my most popular blog posts is my ecommerce case study from when some friends and I started an ecommerce business in 2012. It gets hundreds of people viewing it each month and leads to lots of questions on twitter, linkedin and my blog.
I covered how we decided to launch an ecommerce, how we picked a product and how we validated the idea without spending lots money out of pocket. My goal was to share how we see the market and how you can validate any business idea without spending months and thousands of dollars to do it.
So what did we sell and what was the store called? We sold condoms on La Condonería.
In this episode, we cover the original case study, along with changes since I wrote the original post in 2015 and Magma Partners view on ecommerce in the region.
I hope you enjoy this style of episode of Crossing Borders. Please give me feedback in the comments or on social media on whether you did. If enough people like it, I can go through other industries that are popular in Latin America.
Show Notes
02:02 → Why we decided to look at ecommerce
03:23 → How did e-commerce work in Chile in 2012?
03:59 → What we’ll cover in the podcast
04:45 → First Step: Research
05:12 → The 4 Phases of ecommerce markets
05:45 → Chile’s Phase in 2012 and now
06:41 → Step 2: What do we sell?
06:59 → 7 opportunities in E-commerce in Latam
07:40 → Discarded ecommerce ideas
09:16 → Selling commodity Products
09:51 → The 3 ecommerce Options that made sense
10:15 → Option 3, selling commodity products
10:46 → Step 3: What Product should we actually sell?
11:30 → Criteria to define the best products
15:28 → The product we chose
16:27 → Step 4: How we can validate without spending much time and a lot of money?
19:39 → Comment on payments in Latin America
19:58 → Step 5: Building the foundation
22:48 → What we’d done in the first 6 months of operations
23:13 → Step 6: New opportunities for scaling revenue
26:00 → Our ecommerce after 12 months
26:37 → What we learned from this whole process
27:39 → Ideas from our initial list that have been launched since 2012
28:54 → What did we learn about e-commerce in LatAm?
31:53 → Why we don’t invest in e-commerce at Magma Partners
32:53 → Trends in Latam e-commerce
34:18 → Podcast with one of the founders of Mercadoni
34:24 → Other Latin American Ecommerce Trends
Companies and People Mentioned
- Original Ecommerce Case Study
- Jumpseller – Shopify for Latin America
- Tiago Matos – Cofounder Jumpseller
- Mercadoni
- Rappi
- Cornershop
- Buscalibre
- Amazon
- Mercado Libre
- Movile
- Alibaba
- Jack Ma
- Linio
- Zappos