How to Accelerate Social Commerce Growth in Latin America

Social commerce is no longer simply about selling through social platforms. Today, it means redesigning the shopping experience to reduce the distance between discovery and conversion. The challenge is no longer about adopting a new platform, but about integrating content, technology, data and operations to build simple, seamless and scalable experiences.

Consumers no longer distinguish between entertainment, discovery and shopping. They expect to be able to do everything within the same digital environment, moving from a video or recommendation to a purchase with as few steps as possible. This shift is forcing companies to rethink how they design their customer journeys.

However, accelerating conversion still presents significant challenges. Differences between platforms, varying levels of trust in payment systems, service expectations and fragmented data create friction that many organizations have yet to resolve.

The goal is to design an integrated ecosystem where content, products, checkout, creators and operations work together seamlessly. Implementation speed is also changing: rather than relying on large, long-term transformations, companies need to build capabilities that enable them to test, learn and continuously optimize.

In this context, the focus is on integrating technology, data, creativity and human-centered design to accelerate results sustainably.

The cases developed by VML LATAM show that there is no single formula for driving social commerce. What successful initiatives have in common is that they start with people’s behaviors and build commerce experiences around those habits.

In Brazil, Avon turned the launch of a collection created with singer Ana Castela into a community-driven experience. The strategy went far beyond traditional influencer marketing: it brought together fan pages, TikTok Shop, livestreams, exclusive content and participatory experiences, turning followers themselves into protagonists of the campaign. As a result, the launch became a trending topic, searches related to the campaign increased by 500%, the gloss became Avon’s best-selling product of the year, 89% of new customers were Gen Z, and average order value increased by 24% during the campaign period.

In Uruguay, Supermercados Tata faced a very different challenge: bringing e-commerce closer to older consumers. Rather than asking them to change their digital habits, the brand leveraged an existing behavior: the everyday exchange of GIFs on WhatsApp. By integrating promotions into this content, Tata turned a social practice into an entry point for e-commerce, increasing first-time online purchases among the target segment by 15% and repeat purchase frequency among these new digital users by 9%.

Both cases demonstrate that social commerce growth does not depend solely on adopting new technologies. It requires a deep understanding of the cultural dynamics and behaviors of each audience in order to reduce friction between inspiration and purchase.