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Chile's online sales head for a record US$10.6bn as chamber campaigns drive the market

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oct 21 2026 · 4 λεπτά ανάγνωσης

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Chile's online sales head for a record US$10.6bn as chamber campaigns drive the market

Chile's online sales head for a record US$10.6bn as chamber campaigns drive the market

The Cámara de Comercio de Santiago (CCS) expects online sales to close 2026 near US$10.6bn — an all-time high. E-commerce grew 12.2% after inflation so far this year, the fastest-growing activity in the Chilean economy, and the chamber's president, María Teresa Vial, called it "a key engine of the national economy" at the 11th eCommerce Innovation Summit on 15 October, where more than 1,200 people gathered to map what comes next.

The numbers, and the caveat behind them

Online spending reached US$525 per person per year in goods — still below what Chile's GDP per capita would suggest, according to the CCS's head of studies, George Lever. The chamber's commercial calendar — CyberDay, CyberMonday, Black Friday and others — brings together more than 700 brands, and its scale is not new: CyberMonday 2024 alone logged US$447m, beating the chamber's own projections. But Lever flagged a deceleration in sales growth over the coming months. The five-year outlook stays among the most optimistic globally, around 10% a year — the record year is a peak inside a longer climb, not a finish line.

How channels and consumers are moving

Globally, Lever pointed to a radical retail transformation: China consolidated as the sector's main leader and electronic marketplaces dominate consumer preference worldwide. Chile ran its own arc — a pandemic surge, a post-pandemic contraction, and now an optimistic projection. Digital consumption is still led by women and younger consumers, with groceries, supermarkets and pharmacies outpacing traditional categories. The structural headaches he named: the VAT now applied to cross-border purchases, and a wide technology-adoption gap between large companies and SMEs. Even so, the mass campaign events have become the country's most relevant commercial engines, cushioning the slowdown in physical retail.

AI and agentic commerce arrive at the checkout

Lever positioned AI as the key technology for the next phase: reducing friction in the buying experience and powering agentic commerce — AI systems that research and buy on the user's behalf. More than half of young Chilean consumers already use AI to compare prices, find recommendations and read reviews before buying, with surprisingly high trust in the tools. The projection he shared: AI and smart agents will evolve quickly toward automated recommendations and seamless transactions, redefining the shopping experience within a few years. At the summit, the CCS and Meta also presented a suite of three AI tools for SMEs — covering expense management, marketing and cash flow — to move small businesses from experimental use to daily applications, under a human-supervision approach.

What it means if you sell online in Chile

Chile's campaign season — CyberDay, CyberMonday and Black Friday — is when most of the year's demand shows up. If your catalogue, prices and stock are current when one of those campaigns opens, you compete for traffic the chamber is already paying to generate. If they are not, the traffic arrives and finds a stale page.

Why it matters

Those campaigns already bring the buyers — what decides whether they reach you is whether your store is ready. And the way people search is shifting under the campaigns themselves: when half of young shoppers ask an AI for comparisons before they click, a store with clean data, current prices and quotable products is easier to recommend than one with a stale catalogue.

This week

Check that your catalogue, prices and stock match what you actually sell. Run through your top 20 listings as a buyer would: is the price current, is stock shown, can they request a quote? Then put the chamber's campaign dates in your calendar and work backwards — pages, offers and stock ready before day one, not on the day it opens.

Sources

Chile's online demand is growing: make sure your store is findable

The traffic is coming either way. A vcity store keeps your catalogue, prices and stock in one place, with booking and quotes built in, so a campaign — or an AI recommending on a shopper's behalf — finds you ready instead of catching you mid-update.

Create your store → https://vcity.io/pricing

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