Selling on Mercado Libre solves in a day what building your own store takes months to solve: a payment gateway, logistics, dispute handling, and the buyer’s confidence that no one is going to disappear with their money. What it does not solve is leaving you with anything for next time: no phone number, no email, no history you can use yourself. The customer bought from your Mercado Libre store, but the data of who they are belongs to Mercado Libre, not to you.
The platform wins the relationship, not just the commission
Per the Radiografía del e-commerce study by GfK and Mercado Libre (2023, a survey of 1,068 people in Lima), half of Mercado Libre’s revenue in Peru already comes from small businesses, the other half from large brands. In other countries in the region that share reaches 80% in favor of small businesses, per the same study: more and more small businesses are not just testing the channel, they are billing serious volume through it. What the platform does not hand back in return is the buyer’s contact. Messages between the two sides run through Mercado Libre’s own messaging system, and the phone number, email, and purchase history stay with the platform, not the seller.
That is a different problem from selling through a social media chat, where the issue is that no one records the order at all. Here the order does get recorded, with an invoice, tracking, and even a review. The data exists. It simply is not yours.
What to do with the sale that is actually yours
The point is not to stop selling on a marketplace: it is still the fastest way to reach a new buyer, with a guarantee a small business cannot yet offer on its own. The point is not to treat that sale as if it were the same as a sale on an owned channel.
- Split the channel out in your reporting. A marketplace sale does not leave you with a customer you can contact again yourself: count it as acquisition, not as part of your owned base.
- Give people a reason to come back outside the platform. A card in the package with your WhatsApp number or your own catalog turns part of that buyer into a contact you actually manage.
- Measure how much of your revenue depends on a channel that gives you no data. If half your sales run through a marketplace, half your business has no one to talk to again without paying the platform for access all over.
It is the same logic as getting paid in cash at the counter: the sale closes either way, but what data is left afterward changes with the channel. On a marketplace, that data is not missing by accident: the platform keeps it on purpose, because the buyer is its customer too.
If your business already sells on Mercado Libre and you do not know how much of that base you could recover as a first-party contact, that is the first diagnostic in the work we do in data marketing in Peru: measuring how much of your revenue depends on a channel that never hands you the data, before building any retention campaign on a base you do not actually have.