Andrés Felipe Archila
LOGISTICS
Andrés Felipe Archila
TITLE : CO-FOUNDER COMPANY : MELONN INDUSTRY : LOGISTICS
Archila is a multilingual , award-winning engineer , with a masters in Transportation from MIT and 10 years of expertise in transportation and logistics . His main interests are entrepreneurship , consulting , education , research and public policy .
B2C ecommerce ' hard ' in Latin America In an interview with Accenture , Archila says : “ We ’ re a third-party logistics partner for B2C e-commerce but doing that in Latin America is really , really hard .
“ There ’ s not the same level of trust in e-commerce in Latin America that you have in the United States or Europe . In Latin America , if you buy something through an e-commerce channel , the first things you ask are , ‘ Will it get here on time ?’, or ‘ Will it get here at all ?’
“ Without trust that the packages will get there , and payments will be reliable , the system breaks down . This is the main barrier to e-commerce in Latin America .”
Expanding on the trust issue , Archila says the on-time performance of the overall e-commerce industry in Latin America is “ not great ”.
This , he says , is why Mellon reduces customer anxiety across the whole ecosystem through transparency .
“ When you have trusting customers , you have recurring customers , and it becomes a reinforcement cycle ,” he says .
Mellon ’ s trust reinforcement strategies also extend to payment methods .
“ Not everybody has a credit card or a debit card , and even if they do , many won ’ t put their banking information online ,” says Archila . “ Working with a partner like Melonn
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