Katie Couric and Sean Summers explore the future of e-commerce in Latin America

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Katie Couric: [voice-over] Welcome to Future Ready by Think with Google. I’m Katie Couric.

Couric: Very nice to meet you!

Sean Summers: Thank you for the invitation!

Katie Couric: [voice-over] Sean Summers is the chief marketing officer and executive vice president at Mercado Libre, which is the largest e-commerce and fintech business in Latin America.

Couric: Well, let’s start talking about your job, and your company. Tell us what your company is and what you do.

Summers: It’s an interesting company. Mercado Libre was founded almost 25 years ago in South America, in Argentina, and expanded rapidly across the region. And we are today the largest e-commerce and fintech player in the region. We operate in many countries from Mexico and south.

Couric: You have been instrumental in the success of Mercado Libre, helping it scale from $300 million to $10 billion in revenue. How did you do that?

Summers: The way we built the company, it’s being obsessed by solving small problems that our consumers have. Either we see identified problems or opportunities with our consumers. And we always think, “How can we build a product using technology that is going to make this experience better, easier?” And just by focusing on doing that and innovating, we move from being your consumer-to-consumer marketplace to a massive ecosystem.

So for us, it’s all about learning and unlearning. Because whatever made me successful today probably is going to hold me back next year. So everything that we develop, we assume that it’s going to become sort of obsolete quickly.

Couric: How do you keep up with trends in how fast the world is changing?

Summers: I would say that we follow the top hundred technology companies. We’ve been doing it for years. Always looking for interesting trends or for things that could be relevant for us. We like looking to the outside world, but then making the choices. What’s relevant for us? When is it going to be relevant? And how do we make it ownable by MELI?

Couric: How do you accommodate for that mosaic of countries you’re serving that make up Latin America?

Summers: I think that from day one, what we’ve tried to do is look for the commonalities. We try to build platforms that work across countries. Because if not, it’s not very efficient. But once you have that common platform, the end goal is the same. We want every single country to have every single functionality. So I would say that the strategy is the same for every single country. What you might have is countries in different stages of development. So maybe the platform in Brazil and Mexico is, you know, highly developed. I mean, Argentina is slightly behind and then Chile.

But I would say in general, try to leverage 90% of the platforms regionally and then tailor-made the last 10% of the solution.

Couric: How do you manage satisfying both sellers and shoppers?

Summers: This is a two-sided marketplace. That’s difficult, because you’re always trying to balance. I would say at the beginning, when you’re building this, the supply side — having enough products and enough sellers — is super important. And that was our focus for probably the first 10 years. But then eventually, if you want consumers to come back and come back more frequently, you have to make sure that the consumer experience gets better and better.

Couric: It’s interesting because I know smoothing out the customer experience was something you really wanted to address before you scaled the business. Why was that so important to you?

Summers: I think that the whole business model is predicated on having people come back. It’s very expensive to acquire one user. If that user is going to come and go, and I have to reacquire him or her next month or next quarter, it’s very hard to build a business model. So you have to bring people, offer them a good-enough experience — because it’s never perfect and it’s always improving. But, you know, good enough so that you give them a reason to come back the next time.

There was a time that was around 2010. We were already a public company, so we had all the demands of being a public company. We realized that the old infrastructure wouldn’t allow us to scale, and we faced this situation where we said, look, today we’re not feeling the pain, but in two years’ time this is not going to look good.

We had to make a decision not to innovate for two years because we would put the entire development team to rewrite every single line of code so that that would allow us to go back to innovating. So we don’t believe in taking shortcuts in Mercado Libre. That’s the approach. You know, take the long, hard road. But that’s going to allow you to build real competitive advantages.

Couric: How has your mission changed lives?

Sean Summers: We do a research every couple of years about the number of people who build businesses around Mercado Libre using our tools. Mercado Libre, it’s mostly used by micro, small, and medium enterprises.

Couric: Yeah, mom-and-pop operations? And bigger?

Summers: Yeah, and bigger. And we also have big retailers and brands. That’s part of what the changes to the platform enabled, was to integrate also big retailers. But we’re giving the small retailer, the small entrepreneur, the same tools to compete with the big guys. And what we know is that the last time that we did the research, a million people in Latin America live mostly on what they make by operating with our tools in Mercado Libre, with Mercado Pago. And the number of stories of people who talk about being able to come back from financial hardship and build a small business that gave, first, employment to their immediate family and then to the community. Those are the things that move us.

We’re proud to be a partner of the Disneys, the Warners, and Nikes and Adidas of this world. But what really drives us is knowing that we only succeed if there are millions of sellers out there succeeding, using our tools.

Couric: Sean, as you said, things are changing constantly — the technology, consumer behavior — and you have to stay on top of it. What are you most excited about when it comes to the future of e-commerce?

Summers: Two things that come to mind. First is what I call e-commerce as a discovery tool. First 20 years of e-commerce, I think that our platform and most of the platforms have been really good when you know “I want to buy a cell phone,” even if you don’t know the brand.

In that — I call it “search-driven occasion,” we’ve been really, really good. But this idea of window-shopping, e-commerce has never been really good at window-shopping. No, I don’t know, I might get tempted. So now what I’ve seen over the last couple of years is we are developing new experiences like video experiences, where some people call it “social commerce.”

But I think there’s something about introducing products in a different way and helping consumers uncover a product that they didn’t know or didn’t think that they needed.

But social commerce only works not only by presenting products, you have to finish the transactions. And we’re really good at creating the conditions to finish a transaction.

So I think that our approach to social commerce is an integrated one. Not just about how an influencer is going to present the product, it’s how do we turn that into an actual transaction.

The other thing that I’m super — I think it’s transformative. We’ve been working with artificial intelligence for 10 years, eight or 10 years, and most of our business runs with artificial intelligence.

But I think that generative artificial intelligence is going to help us create new experiences. It’s going to transform the way you operate inside our apps. And definitely I think we are scratching the surface of what that technology could allow us to offer new experiences and to improve existing ones.

Couric: Well, it’s very exciting. The world is changing so quickly. It’s amazing, isn’t it?

Summers: Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s fun. This is a really fun company and industry.

Couric: Sean, thank you so much. Great to be with you. Really interesting conversation.

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