Amazon Is Trying to Convince Suspicious Mexican Shoppers to Buy Online Ana Campoy - Qz.com
go to original October 1, 2015

Some people like the old ways (Reuters)

Amazon launched its Mexican marketplace with great fanfare this summer, but the country’s e-commerce market is still tiny. One way Amazon is trying to grow it is by giving Mexicans a familiar place to pick up their online purchases: The corner store.

The online giant is running a trial delivering goods bought through its Mexico site to Oxxo, a ubiquitous chain of convenience stores, reports Mexican newspaper El Universal (link in Spanish). Femsa, Oxxo’s parent company, told Quartz the scope of the trial is modest—it includes only ten of Oxxo’s nearly 13,000 stores in the country, and a limited selection of what Amazon sells. A spokesman for Amazon declined to comment.

But analysts say such an arrangement could prove a neat solution to some of the problems that that have kept Mexico, the world’s 15th-largest economy, punching well below its weight in online sales:



Many Mexicans shy away from internet shopping for fear that criminals will steal their data from online retailers, or packages from their doorstep. Delivery services, moreover, aren’t that efficient or reliable.

As a result, Mexicans tend to buy services online but not physical goods. Internet retailing accounted for only 1.6% of overall business-to-consumer product sales in 2014, according to Amanda Bourlier at Euromonitor International. Americans, in contrast, bought 8% of their stuff online.

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