Who Actually Owns Your Customer in Mexican E-Commerce?

3 weeks ago

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Every brand selling online in Mexico knows whether it made the sale. Fewer know whether it built a customer relationship. A transaction closed on a marketplace settles the books for the month, but that is usually where it ends. The buyer’s data, their next order, the ability to reach them again without paying for the introduction a second time, all of that largely stays with whoever controls the transaction. In Mexico, that’s rarely the brand itself.

It helps to look at the scale of what is actually shifting. Direct-to-consumer sales across Latin America are growing roughly 15% a year, on track to reach close to US$38 billion by 2028, according to Americas Market Intelligence. In Mexico, NubeCommerce, Tiendanube’s annual study on the Mexican e-commerce sector, found something even more telling: the D2C business of Mexican brands has grown sixfold in the past three years, and more than half of the brands running their own channel now live exclusively off e-commerce. D2C has moved well beyond the territory of digitally native brands. It is becoming a core part of how Mexican companies reach, understand and retain their customers. The strategic question is no longer whether brands need a direct channel, but what role that channel should play alongside marketplaces and other points of sale.

Marketplaces remain an efficient way for brands to reach demand they would struggle to build on their own. They offer scale, traffic and a ready-made buying environment, and that value explains why they will continue to play an important role in Mexican e-commerce. The limitation appears when reach becomes dependence. Marketplace commissions can represent a significant share of each transaction, but the bigger cost is often what happens after the sale: the brand has limited ability to deepen the relationship, encourage repeat purchases directly or learn enough from that customer to improve the next interaction. The real advantage of an owned channel, then, is not simply lower cost. It is that every transaction can create context for the next one.

The Second Shift That Is Not Fully Priced In

There is a second shift happening alongside the first that many brands still have not fully priced in. Product discovery, questions, recommendations and purchase decisions increasingly happen through channels such as WhatsApp and Instagram, often before the buyer ever reaches a traditional storefront. The sale is no longer simply the step that comes after a search and comparison. It increasingly develops in the middle of a conversation. Owning your channel used to mean owning a domain. These days it increasingly means owning the relationship across the conversation.

This is where the definition of D2C itself needs to evolve. For years, “going direct” often meant launching a website, adding a checkout and expecting customers to find their way there. For many brands, that model was never enough to materially change the business.

Today, the bar is higher. A direct channel has to connect discovery, conversation, purchase and post-sale into a coherent experience. The goal is not simply to create another destination, but to build a commercial relationship that can continue across channels and improve with every interaction. A store treated only as a destination has to keep reacquiring attention. A direct relationship, by contrast, can compound it.

New Tools Make Connecting Experiences Easier

None of the infrastructure needed for this is experimental anymore. Tools for commerce, payments, logistics, customer communication and increasingly artificial intelligence are making it easier for brands to connect these experiences without rebuilding their businesses from scratch. What is often harder is the organizational shift: to stop treating the owned channel as a side project next to the “real” business and start treating it as part of the company’s commercial infrastructure.

None of this means brands should abandon marketplaces. Their reach and ability to generate demand remain valuable. The stronger model is one in which marketplaces and direct channels play complementary roles: one can expand access to customers, while the other gives the brand a greater ability to learn, retain and build long-term value from those relationships.

The question worth asking isn’t “where do we sell online.” It is “which of our channels will still know this customer a year from now.”

In a market growing this fast, that distinction will matter more. The brands that build direct relationships today will be better positioned to understand what their customers want, serve them across more moments and turn individual transactions into long-term value.