The global e-commerce playbook is being rewritten in emerging markets
Singapore businesses should look towards the Global South, not West, for the future of e-commerce
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AFTER recently moving from Brazil to Singapore, one thing I still find myself reflecting on is how ordinary digital payments feel back home.
On my way to work in Sao Paulo or Curitiba, I might pay for a coffee with Pix, Brazil’s primary instant payment system, using my phone. My Uber ride arrives, and the payment happens automatically through a digital wallet.
When sending my car for maintenance, I have the option to pay for the service in instalments. Later in the day, my streaming subscriptions renew without a credit card, through Pix Automatico, a feature designed for recurring payments. I pay utility bills with a bank slip called “boleto”.
For many people outside emerging markets, this may sound unusual. But in Brazil, this is simply daily life.
For years, global commerce was built on a simple assumption: the world would converge towards Western consumer behaviour. If you were designing a digital product, the blueprint would be familiar.
Optimise for credit cards, desktop-first checkout flows, and spending patterns shaped in the US and Western Europe.
That model worked… until it didn’t.
Today, the most important shifts in digital commerce are not happening in those markets. They are happening in South-east Asia, Africa and Latin America, where a new generation of consumers is rewriting the rules.
They are younger, mobile-first and far more digitally native than previous generations. But more importantly, they did not “transition” into digital commerce the way Western consumers did. They were born into it.
Many skipped the desktop era entirely. Many never built deep habits around credit cards. Instead, they came online through smartphones, adopted digital wallets early, and normalised instant, account-to-account payments as their default way of transacting.
As a result, the global e-commerce playbook is becoming increasingly outdated.
A different growth curve
The scale of this shift is difficult to ignore. More than one billion people in emerging markets are projected to join the consumer class by 2036, representing a 32 per cent increase in the consumer base, according to data enterprise World Data Lab.
Its research commissioned by Ebanx projects that the online spending among consumers aged 15 to 45 in South-east Asia will grow from US$131 billion in 2025 to nearly US$218 billion by 2030, after expanding at more than 10 per cent per year.
By 2035, spending from this demographic is expected to approach US$294 billion.
Latin America is growing even faster. Online spending among the same age group is forecast to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 12.5 per cent between 2025 and 2030, increasing from US$145 billion in 2025 to more than US$354 billion by 2035.
This growth reflects the emergence of a consumer cohort with distinct behaviours and expectations that are increasingly influencing how commerce evolves.
Discovery, engagement and transactions are increasingly happening within the same mobile ecosystem.
Payments are where the shift becomes visible
For decades, international merchants viewed credit cards as the universal gateway to online commerce. In many emerging markets, however, consumers are increasingly gravitating towards digital wallets and instant payment systems that better reflect how they manage their daily finances.
Brazil offers one of the clearest examples.
Launched by the Central Bank of Brazil in 2020, Pix has been adopted by more than 163 million people (95 per cent of Brazilian adults) and has fundamentally transformed how consumers and businesses transact.
Consumer demand for novel goods and services often exists in these markets, but conversion does not follow automatically.
The difference usually comes down to whether businesses are able to adapt to local payment preferences and, in doing so, unlock entirely new customer segments.
The impact is increasingly visible across emerging markets.
In Brazil, recurring payments through Pix Automatico are helping subscription-based businesses reach consumers who prefer instant payments over traditional card-based billing.
Early adoption trends suggest that many users are engaging with digital services through this model for the first time.
A similar pattern is emerging in Peru, where credit card penetration remains relatively low, at 13 per cent among adults, according to World Bank Global Findex 2025.
As local digital wallets become more deeply integrated into e-commerce ecosystems, merchants are seeing stronger customer acquisition and repeat purchase rates.
In these cases, the payment method is not simply a checkout tool; it becomes an enabler of participation in the digital economy.
For business leaders, particularly those based in regional hubs such as Singapore, the implication extends beyond payments. It challenges a longstanding assumption that innovation in consumer behaviour originates primarily in developed markets before spreading elsewhere.
Increasingly, the reverse is true. Emerging markets are becoming testing grounds for new forms of digital engagement, from instant payments and embedded finance to mobile-first commerce experiences.
Consumers in Jakarta, Sao Paulo or Manila are often adopting and normalising these behaviours at a pace that outstrips more mature economies.
The companies that succeed over the next decade will be those willing to design for these realities from the outset.
Rather than viewing emerging markets as destinations for expansion, they should increasingly be seen as sources of insight into where global commerce is heading next.
The writer is chief product officer of Ebanx and chief executive officer of Ebanx Singapore
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