Building B2B eCommerce in Latin America: Why Community Matters More Than Ever

B2B eCommerce isn’t growing at the same pace everywhere. In Latin America specifically, momentum is building fast, and a recent conversation on The B2B eCommerce Show offered a clear window into why.

A recent conversation explored the story of Ljubitza Frkovich Mallqui, Digital Transformation Manager at Promelsa in Peru and the newly appointed LATAM Chapter Lead for the B2B eCommerce Association. Her story is a reminder of something we see across the industry again and again: transformation doesn’t start with technology. It starts with people.

Starting From Scratch

Ljubitza’s path into B2B eCommerce began without a roadmap. As Head of Marketing at Promelsa, she was tasked with building an eCommerce capability, but there was no local playbook and no one nearby who’d done it before.

That’s a familiar position for a lot of B2B organizations. Unlike B2C, where best practices are everywhere, B2B eCommerce means working through complex buying groups (engineers, installers, procurement, distributors), fragmented product data, legacy systems, and internal resistance to change, often all at once. For Ljubitza, the only option was to teach herself: studying global content, researching leading US distributors, and reverse-engineering what “good” actually looked like from the outside.

Looking Outside the Region

A turning point came when she started benchmarking against companies like Grainger, Graybar, and Wesco. Studying them gave her a sense of what B2B in Latin America could eventually become.

It points to something worth noting: markets that are behind on digital maturity aren’t necessarily stuck there. They can leapfrog by learning from more advanced markets elsewhere. The catch is that access to that kind of knowledge takes time, budget, language capability, and networks, which is exactly where community becomes useful.

The Isolation of Digital Roles

One of the more candid parts of the conversation was about isolation. Ljubitza described years of feeling like she was the only one “speaking this language” inside her organization and her local market.

That’s not unique to her. Digital leaders in B2B often sit outside the traditional business structure, struggle to get stakeholders aligned, and don’t have much internal peer support. A lot of the work is just figuring it out alone. Finding a global community of people doing similar work tends to be a turning point: it offers validation, shared experience, practical answers, and the confidence to actually push for change.

A Region of Extremes

Digital maturity across Latin America isn’t uniform. It’s polarized: some organizations are already running pricing automation, data strategy, and integrated systems, while others are just getting started.

To make sense of that gap, Ljubitza is launching a regional digital maturity initiative that will benchmark where companies actually stand across:

• eCommerce adoption
• CRM and customer data
• Product information management (PIM)
• System integration
• Analytics and BI
• Marketing automation

The goal is straightforward: understand where companies are today so they can be pointed toward what to do next.

Why Community-Led Growth Matters

Expanding the B2B eCommerce Association into LATAM isn’t really about geography. It’s about shortening the learning curve. What took Ljubitza and other early adopters years should take the next wave of leaders months, or even weeks, and that’s the role a strong industry community plays: accelerating learning, sharing real experience, and connecting people who are working through the same problems, while giving local voices a real platform.

Content First, Then Connection

The LATAM chapter is starting with practitioner-led content: conversations with manufacturers and distributors, short-form insights from people in the industry, real case discussions on pricing, change management, and data challenges, and localized blogs and thought leadership. The focus is on what’s actually working, not theory.

Content is the starting point, not the endpoint. A dedicated LATAM B2B eCommerce event is already being explored for 2027, aimed at bringing practitioners together in person to build the kind of relationships that content alone can’t.