Latin America’s Mercado Libre taps AWS as its primary cloud provider

By Pavithra R

Mercado Libre, Latin America’s e-commerce technology company headquartered in Argentina and Brazil has selected AWS as its primary cloud provider to transform the company into a data-driven organization, improving user experiences, accelerating the launch of new services, and supporting its regional expansion.

Mercado Libre is among the largest online commerce and payments provider in Latin America, connecting businesses across 18 countries with more than 76 mn active users. The firm builds on the scalability, security, and proven performance of AWS as well as its unparalleled portfolio of services, to drive e-commerce and support the growth of its Mercado Pago digital payment platform and Mercado Crédito credit line.

During the pandemic, Mercado Libre leveraged AWS to extend its services to more small and medium businesses (SMBs) in Latin America, giving them access to online payments and contactless store payment technology.

“Mercado Libre has grown dramatically over the past two decades, democratizing the benefits of trade and digital payments to entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized enterprises, businesses, and millions of customers throughout Latin America. Working with AWS, we aim to further exceed our customers’ expectations by leveraging data to continuously improve our operations and innovate new services. Mercado Libre employees use data in their daily tasks to make better business decisions and stay ahead of buying trends. We look forward to expanding our use of AWS machine learning and analytics services throughout the company to develop deeper insights that will sustain Mercado Libre’s position as a growth engine for Latin America,” said Sebastian Barrios, Tech Vice President of Mercado Libre.

Mercado Libre selected AWS to support the development of a common platform to gain insights from its experience of data gathering from its marketplace, digital payments, logistics, advertising, and software services divisions. The firm, as part of its transformation into a data-driven organization, is building MeliLake, a data lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), to ingest data from sales, payments, fulfilment, and shipping transactions and make it available for analysis by teams throughout the company. 

MeliLake leverages Amazon EMR to facilitate the processing and analysis of more than 25 terabytes of transaction data each day. The company leverages tools from AWS partners Tableau and MicroStrategy to automatically tag, search, share, transform, and analyze that data. Additionally, Mercado Libre applies AWS machine learning services to enhance security across its divisions and deliver a better customer experience. The firm also leverages Amazon Rekognition as part of its identity verification process to minimize fraud, and Amazon Translate to automatically translate product titles and descriptions when vendors from other countries upload their catalogs. It uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to process an average of 464 visits and 19 purchases per second and Amazon DynamoDB to support the secure purchase and payment transactions for its customers, as well as manage shipping, billing, and logistics.

“As one of the leading innovators in the e-commerce, finance, and technology industries, Mercado Libre is leveraging the unmatched scale, performance, and breadth and depth of services of the world’s leading cloud to rapidly develop and implement new ideas that raise the bar for customer experiences. AWS not only powers Mercado Libre’s vast backend operations for its marketplace but also provides the services to enable Mercado Libre to gain predictive insights into business trends and innovate new services to more seamlessly connect their growing community of buyers and sellers,” said Jaime Valles, Director of AWS Sales, Latin America.