Amazon, a giant e-commerce platform has rolled out one-day free delivery services to Brazilian Prime members in 50 cities across the Latin America hotspot, amid fierce market competition in Latin America’s largest economy. This move has been motivated by Amazon’s rivals such as MercadoLibre (MELI.O) and Magazine Luiza (MGLU3.SA) investing heavily to ramp up delivery speeds and winning clients.
This Amazon privilege exists only for Prime subscribers in markets across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which arrives two years after Prime was first launched in Brazil. Earlier, Prime users in Brazil had access to free two-day shipping with the option of paying extra for one-day delivery. Around 105 million people in Brazil shop using e-commerce tools despite the fact that e-commerce competition is steep there.
“In the last year, we’ve developed better infrastructure especially in the country’s capital cities with new distribution centers, and this is what helped make one-day delivery possible,” Mariana Roth, head of Amazon Prime in Brazil told Reuters in an interview.
Amazon ranked fourth in the country in terms of monthly website visits, trailing behind regional and domestic competitors MercadoLibre, Americanas, and SoftBank-backed OLX, according to a ranking compiled by payments company Ebanx.
Logistics is considered to be a tricky part of Brazilian e-commerce due to its continental-sized country with patchy infrastructure. Previously, MercadoLibre announced an investment of 10 billion reais ($1.91 billion) into logistics in Brazil, where, as of June, it has been experimenting with same-day shipping in some cities.
“In the last year, we’ve developed better infrastructure, especially in the country’s capital cities with new distribution centers, and this is what helped make one-day delivery possible,” Mariana Roth, head of Amazon Prime in Brazil, told Reuters in an interview. Nevertheless, Roth did not specify how many new Prime users the initiative is expected to attract, nor how much revenue it is predicted to draw for the company.