Two-Thirds of Brazilians Used Smartphones During Last Retail Purchase

Smartphones are — and have long been — the driving force of the Brazilian eCommerce market. More than half of all Brazilian shoppers used their smartphones to make their most recent retail purchases, in fact, and no two of them used those smartphones in the same way. Some use them to order via app, others to pay via mobile wallet and others locate products in brick-and-mortar stores.

This strong preference for mobile-enabled commerce, therefore, presents a conundrum for new businesses looking to get their foot in the door of the Brazilian market: Either provide local shoppers the mobile shopping features they demand or risk losing business to those who do.

This is just one of the key findings uncovered in The 2022 Global Digital Shopping Playbook: Brazil Edition, a PYMNTS and Cybersource collaboration. We surveyed 2,201 consumers and 602 merchants from across Brazil to learn more about how local consumers’ shopping preferences are shifting in tune with the increasingly connected global economy and how well local merchants’ feature offerings measure up to these rapidly changing expectations.

Key findings from our research include the following:

• More than half of Brazilian consumers use their smartphones to enhance shopping experiences. Forty-seven percent of local brick-and-mortar shoppers utilized smartphones within their latest instance of in-store shopping — considerably more than the share of consumers in the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico and Australia that did the same.

• Consumer demand for in-store and curbside pickup options is still nascent in Brazil. Local eCommerce shoppers prefer to have their orders delivered to their homes, with 75% having done so with their most recent purchase.

• Brazilian merchants are ahead of the curve in offering nearly all types of digital shopping features, even if their customers are not using them. These include cross-channel-capable digital profiles, in-store navigation apps and real-time inventory updates.

These findings nevertheless just scratch the surface of the complex ways in which smartphone-enabled commerce is shaping the way Brazilian consumers browse, shop, pay for and acquire their retail purchases. The 2022 Global Digital Shopping Playbook: Brazil Edition provides a 360-degree overview of this market and a first-hand account of what Brazilian merchants get right about cross-channel shopping.

To learn more about the digital shopping innovations and policies that have helped Brazilian merchants become global leaders in eCommerce, download the report.