Latin America’s largest ecommerce store, Linio, has selected Payoneer Inc., a leading online payments company transforming the way businesses send and receive cross-border payments, to power its payments to sellers worldwide. The partnership will provide international sellers access to the estimated $88 billion Latin-American ecommerce market through Linio’s 8 localized platforms, by allowing them to receive their funds using Payoneer’s low-cost, flexible payment solutions.
Since entering the market just 4 years ago, Linio has experienced a huge upward growth, with Linio Mexico alone supporting around 30 million site visitors a month and thousands of sellers worldwide. This has come at a heavy price for Linio, as international wires have been prohibitively expensive and time consuming, creating an unsustainable platform for such rapid growth. Payoneer will help Linio remove the barriers to scaling, offering the integrated solution as the preferred payout option for sellers in Asia, US, Europe and Latin America, with the goal of servicing over 10,000 sellers within a year.
The integration is timely, with Linio’s sales from cross-border sellers quadrupling in the last half of 2015. During the holiday season in Latin America, items sold from Asia accounted for 68% of all of Linio’s cross-border sales. This complements trends seen by Payoneer’s ecosystem of sellers: the volume of cross-border sales originating from Asian sellers increased more than 230% this holiday season; and each individual seller had an average increase of 25% in cross-border goods sold. The world is in the midst of a massive increase in ecommerce, creating an exciting new opportunities for cross-border trade.
“Cross-border payments has been one of the biggest challenges for Linio and its global sellers,” said Carlos Alcántara, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Cross-Border Sales at Linio. “High fees from traditional banking services, a lack of transparency, delays, and manual processing have all made payments a major roadblock for global sellers offering their products on Linio.com. Now, thanks to our integration with Payoneer, we can offer our sellers one solution for all cross-border payments, which will allow them to increase global sales without the hassle of international transfers.”
Ms. Lin from Globalomerce, an Asian supplier selling in LATAM through Linio explains, “The reason why I chose Linio to go into LATAM was because it is the largest B2C platform in the region, so I don’t have to pay too much attention to local promotion. It’s very common that Chinese sellers use Payoneer to receive payments. Since it takes about one month to open an account abroad and withdrawing cash is also not easy, bank-related activities create the most annoying issues for an online export business. However, Payoneer and its services can solve these problems and sellers can receive payments from Linio without any issues”.
“Payments to international customers should not be a barrier to growth and we’re excited to partner with Linio to turn this challenge and burden into an advantage for them,” said Scott Galit, Payoneer CEO. “Marketplaces continue to develop as the leading ecommerce destinations, connecting buyers in local markets with sellers from around the globe, and Linio has done an amazing job building leading marketplaces in 8 countries in Latin America. We’re delighted that our community of sellers who already get paid by Payoneer on multiple marketplaces around the world were the driving force behind this partnership. We’re committed to serving their needs globally and we’re thrilled to open up this great new partnership with Linio in Latin America to support their continued global expansion."