Francisca Maiza presents SocialBuyers, a crowd‑shipping marketplace that links travelers with buyers in Latin America to overcome high international courier costs and long delivery times caused by regional bureaucracy. She outlines the LATAM cross‑border e‑commerce market (33 million buyers, 28 % of 1.6 billion online shoppers) and positions SocialBuyers as a solution that enables deliveries within 24 hours. The platform lets travelers upload trips and receive assigned orders for a reward, while buyers post orders, pay a handling fee, and are matched with vetted travelers. Traction data shows growth from 4 000 users and 1 000 travelers to 2 000 transactions, a 40 % QoQ increase, and over $6 000 revenue in the first year. The business model charges buyers a handling fee that covers the traveler’s reward, insurance, and a 7 % platform fee, plus a 25 % cut of the traveler’s reward, yielding a 26 % margin. Legal risk is mitigated by not importing goods, using a Chilean law firm, and providing insurance for lost or stolen items. Reputation is managed through mutual ratings; payments are released only after both parties rate each other. Order size is limited to avoid customs or airline issues, and a product whitelist is enforced. Compared to competitor Grabber, SocialBuyers eliminates a bidding process, assigning travelers directly for faster fulfillment. Currency handling is done in USD and converted to Chilean or Argentine pesos for traveler payouts.
Chapters
Hi everyone, my name is Francisca Maiza, I'm from Santiago, Chile. First of all, I want to give you a little context of how Latin America works. Here we don't have access to all the products and services that you can find in the US or in Europe. If we need to buy something from another country, we have to pay huge rates to international couriers and we never have the certainty of how long it's going to take to get my product home. This problem is basically caused because of the huge bureaucracy we have in our countries. So our vision as social buyers is to eliminate distance barrier between people, and so everybody in the world can get the product they need in less than 24 hours in their home. So right now there are 1.6 billion online shoppers worldwide. 28% of these are cross-border shoppers worldwide, and 33 million of these are cross-border buyers from LATAM. So this is our target market. Socialbuyers is a crowdshipping platform that connects travelers with buyers. So if you are a traveler, you just need to upload your trip and we will assign you different orders so you can make extra money while you are traveling. We pay you a reward for grabbing these different orders. On the other side, if you are a buyer, you just need to upload your order. Next, you need to pay the handling fee, and we will assign you a confident traveler who will grab your products home in a safer, faster, and cheaper way. So we started creating this platform at the end of 2016. Right now, on the first quarter, we had 4,000 users. On the second quarter, we had 1,000 travelers. On the third quarter, we get to 2,000 transactions. And right now, in the fourth quarter, we already increased in a 40% our transactions from the last quarter, and this gave us incomes of more than $6,000 this year. So our business model is basically We charge a handling fee to buyers. This handling fee includes the traveler's reward, insurance of the product the buyer is buying, and our fee that is 7% of the price of the product. On the other side, we also charge 25% of the reward to travelers. So we charge both buyers and travelers. And at the end, this gives us a 26% of margin. So I invite you to visit our platform at socialbuyers.cl and help us to eliminate distance barriers with us. So any questions?
All right, that was great. Thank you, Francisca. So yeah, there are some questions coming in here. I'll start out with a few of my own. So we have, okay, so first of all, I'll just make a comment. Definitely the market slide was great in my opinion. You'll see a lot of entrepreneurs will pitch their business and they'll say like, oh, we have a $1 trillion market opportunity, right? You guys did a really good job of boiling down your total addressable market. You know, and I think that was 33 million cross-border transactions, right? Yeah. So on the, you know, you said that you have a lot, there's been a lot of growth in terms of the number of transactions that are being made. Are those transactions being made by the same people? You know, is it like, I guess the question is on the retention side.
Yes, I know. So yeah, most of them are the same people who started with us, but we are increasing the number of buyers. Right now we are increasing our budget in marketing, digital marketing, so that gives us a bigger number of buyers. And also we are starting with connections with Argentina, so We already have some buyers from Argentina too, so that gives us a bigger number.
Great. Okay. And just because I know there's probably a lot of people watching today that might be building these marketplace businesses, right, where you sort of have this chicken and egg problem. I would assume that you guys started by finding the people that wanted the products and then started matching them to the people that were traveling. Is that correct?
Sorry, what?
I would assume that you guys started by finding a lot of people that wanted products and then started matching them to the travelers. Is that correct?
Uh-huh. Yes, yes. So when we have a buyer and when the buyer pays the handling fee, we already have a list of travelers and we match the traveler with, with the buyer. So yeah, that is very fast. It's in less than 24 hours.
Okay, awesome. Well, if anyone else is coming up to the US, definitely check it out. So let's see, I got a couple questions here. Andre wants to know, this product seems to have a huge legal risk. And that, that's in terms of things like customs, taxes and stuff like that. So how do you guys mitigate that?
Yeah, so we are already working with a lawyer's firm, a very big one here in Chile. So we did a— we are not— we don't import products to Chile or to any country. We just— our incomes come from the match of the buyer and the travelers. So We are not importing products to Chile, so we don't have to pay taxes. We just connect buyers with travelers. So that's the first point. And the second thing is about the product itself. We have insurance that protects the product, so if, I don't know, some traveler lost the product or If somebody stole the product or something, this insurance covers the total amount of the product. So we are covered.
Good, good answer. So Dion asks, and sorry if I'm not pronouncing that correctly, is there a vetting process for the travelers and the buyers?
It's a what, sorry?
A vetting process. So basically, you know, like reputation.
A dealing process? Yeah. So you mean if the buyer and the traveler talk to each other?
Oh no, a vetting process. So just, uh, it would be like a reputation management.
Ah, yeah, yeah, sure. So yes, uh, when all the process is finished, uh, we don't pay to the traveler, uh, if the traveler haven't, uh, I don't— make their reputation to the buyer. So we only pay to the traveler if he already marked the number of the reputation of the buyer. So, and the same thing in the buyer, so he needs to evaluate the traveler before receiving the package.
Okay. Sunil asked, what about different countries' import conditions or airport check-in? So, and I think that it's, you know, we definitely understand that from a legal business perspective, like, you're not paying for them to go through customs, but I guess it's a concern for the travelers, right? The buyers.
Yeah. So when a buyer makes the order in our platform, we make sure that the order is not too big or too abusive for the traveler. So nobody can buy 5 computers, and so that would be a problem for the traveler. So what we do is we limit the orders, and every traveler has the right of getting into a country with a limited number of products or of money waste in another country. So we try to limit the orders to this number. So there is not a problem for the traveler.
Right. No, that's good. And a follow-up question from Sunil that I can probably answer as well is that, you know, do you have a special list of products? Right. And I've been on the website, so I saw that, you know, you guys are right. And then you have some technology there to make sure that they're not trying to come in with too much.
Yeah.
Yeah. Don't fill up a whole backpack of iPhones. One for me? Don't fill up a whole backpack of iPhone Xs. Ah, okay. Because that probably won't work. Okay, so Marcio asked, what's the differentiation from Grabber?
Okay, so our business model is a little bit different in Grabber. The buyer and the traveler, they make like a bid. So the buyer makes like a bid with the other travelers. Here we don't do that, we just— the buyer pays us the handling fee and we assign him a traveler, we choose the traveler. So they don't make bids before we assign the traveler to the buyer. So that's the big difference between us and Grabber, and that makes our process faster because at the beginning we did the same thing on Grabber, but we lost a lot of time in this bidding process. So right now we eliminate this and we just go straight to the travelers.
Okay, and Manuel, I think this might be the final question, but thank you all for asking a lot of questions. Clearly, I have a feeling that a lot of people that are writing in doing some traveling, so they're asking some questions to see if this is something they should use. Manuel asked, "How do you get currency— how do you move currency between so many different countries?
How does the traveler get paid?" Travelers get paid in money from their country. So we make all the process, all the handling fees in dollars. But then we make the conversion to the money of each country. Right now we are working only with Chile and Argentina basically, so we do it in Argentinian pesos or in Chilean pesos.
