E-commerce has been gaining traction in Brazil and continues to play an increasingly larger role in the country’s economy. According to the Brazilian E-commerce Association (ABComm), online sales are expected to hit R$224.7 billion by the end of 2025. That’s a 10% increase compared to 2024 and marks the eighth year in a row of steady growth for the industry.
According to the report, this growth is largely driven by new technologies that make it easier to start and run an online business, as well as by changing habits—Brazilians are getting more and more comfortable with shopping online.
These two factors point to one of today’s most important topics: artificial intelligence. A symbol of technological progress, AI was a part of everyday life for 54% of Brazilians in 2024— placing the country above the global average of 48% in AI tool usage. In particular, most use artificial intelligence to search for information online, as a personal assistant, and as a tool to help with their studies. Beyond personal use, CNN reported that 72% of companies worldwide have already adopted AI solutions in their operations.
So, what does this mean for online store owners in Brazil? In this article, we’ll explore how artificial intelligence is shaping digital shopping—and how e-commerce payment solutions are keeping up with this AI-driven tech revolution.
From Merchant to Consumer: AI’s Role in Redefining the E-Commerce Experience
New technologies lead to new habits—and they also give businesses the chance to rethink their processes with the help of powerful new tools. That’s exactly what artificial intelligence is doing for both consumers and merchants.
Here are three key areas that have already been transformed by the rapid adoption of AI in today’s consumer habits.
Personalizing the Customer Experience
You’ve probably heard the term “customer-centric,” a business strategy that focuses on adapting processes and decision-making based on the customer’s experience. While it may sound like a digital-age expression, Austrian consultant and researcher Peter Drucker actually coined it back in 1954. In his book The Practice of Management, Drucker asserted that “it is the customer who determines what a business is, what it produces, and whether it will prosper.”
Decades later, the customizations made possible by artificial intelligence are powerful tools for e-commerce businesses looking to personalize the sales journey and ensure their business meets their customers’ needs—including those who reside in other countries like Brazil.
A practical example is Nike’s use of artificial intelligence. The sports brand uses the technology to adjust discounts in real time by analyzing competitor prices, product availability, and even geographic trends based on the buyer’s location. This allows the company to offer discounts on products that truly make sense for each consumer.
Optimizing Internal Processes and Operational Efficiency
Artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool to enhance the customer’s shopping experience. There are also “behind the scenes” applications that can boost your operations, process data faster, and help optimize costs.
In 2020, before artificial intelligence became such a widespread part of everyday life, the Brazilian fashion retail chain Renner was already announcing its use of AI in its production process.
According to a report by Época Negócios, by combining data like sales history, the country’s economic situation, and even the weather in specific cities, Renner found a more efficient way to distribute products to its stores. The locations that used this customized supply chain approach saw a 12% increase in sales and an 18% reduction in inventory.
Bringing this into the fully online realm, artificial intelligence is already being used by the largest e-commerce companies in the world, such as Amazon. The online giant analyzes market trends and seasonal events—like Black Friday, Christmas, and other peak periods—to find the right balance between demand and supply for its customers.
Another example of how AI is used in e-commerce is content creation—especially for merchants with a large number of products, where each item needs a detailed written description. For instance, Amarra, a global dress distributor based in the U.S., uses ChatGPT to scale their content creation process: The team provides the technical details of each product to standardize descriptions at scale and then refines the AI-provided text to make sure it matches the brand’s tone of voice.
New Touchpoints in the Buyer’s Journey
Artificial intelligence is also redefining how we use social media. One example is Grok, a conversational chatbot for searches that is now part of the user experience on X (formerly Twitter). Naturally, this impact is transforming the shopping experience for people around the globe, including Brazilians.
In May 2025, Valor Econômico reported that one in four Brazilians made at least one online purchase influenced by browsing social media in the previous six months. The study cited, which was conducted by Euromonitor, also showed that in 2024, 10.9% of Brazilian e-commerce sales were directly linked to a shopping experience that started on social media. That number is expected to grow to 11.7% by 2029.
Against this backdrop, TikTok announced in May the launch of TikTok Shop in Brazil—a personalized shopping experience that lets users complete their entire purchase without leaving the app.
Estimates mentioned in the report by Valor Econômico suggest that TikTok Shop could generate up to R$39 billion in 2028, representing between 5% and 9% of total e-commerce revenue in Brazil. It’s worth noting that Brazil is the platform’s third-largest market, with 105.3 million users, according to Extra.
Beyond social media, the report also highlighted another shift in e-commerce: In April, OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) announced that its search features now provide personalized product recommendations and direct links to online stores during conversational interactions with users.
These developments show how AI, along with changing consumer habits in this fast-moving tech landscape, is reshaping the e-commerce buyer journey. With so many new touchpoints in play, online businesses may start seeing purchases driven by AI-powered recommendations—whether from smart platforms or through AI features on social media, like X and TikTok.
But the fragmentation of the buyer journey doesn’t change the importance of a seamless, stable, and secure shopping experience—which brings us to the world of digital payments and how it’s evolving in the age of AI.
How AI Is Powering the Next Generation of Digital Payment Solutions
As a pioneer in digital payment solutions, we at PagBrasil are constantly bringing new technologies to Brazilian merchants. With the current AI landscape in mind, we’ve outlined a few key changes that merchants can already start preparing for.
Using AI to Fight Fraud
The rapid digitalization of the Brazilian experience, which is driving the online economy more than ever, unfortunately also creates more opportunities for scams and fraud attempts. In 2024, Brazilian e-commerce saw a 3.5% increase in fraud compared to the previous year. The average value lost per fraud case also rose, reaching R$343.90 per victim.
Beyond the impact on consumers, online merchants are also targets and can suffer financial losses from scams such as friendly fraud, self-fraud, data breaches, and cyberattacks. To learn more about the different types of fraud online merchants face, we recommend reading our article “How to Prevent Fraud in E-Commerce”.
How does artificial intelligence help with this? In practice, fraud attempts targeting online merchants can be prevented when detection and prevention technologies are put into action.
After all, fraud attempts follow different patterns than those followed by genuine customers shopping online. Monitoring unusual behaviors in your e-commerce operation becomes much more effective when powered by machine learning and AI technologies.
This is the case with PagShield®, PagBrasil’s anti-fraud solution. The technology uses artificial intelligence to tackle the complex task of identifying fraud patterns across more than 4,000 variables, analyzing historical data to cross-reference your e-commerce information with an even larger database.
One of PagShield®’s key strengths is its adaptation to the Brazilian consumer context, from understanding the most popular payment methods to recognizing the main types of fraud affecting consumers in the country. You can read about a real-life example of how our anti-fraud tool enhanced security for a Brazilian e-commerce business in our article focused on reducing chargebacks caused by fraud.
Using AI to Improve Checkout
Every e-commerce merchant knows that checkout is one of the most crucial steps in the buying experience, so it’s natural that artificial intelligence solutions are coming in to help improve conversion at this final stage of the journey.
As you’ve already seen, one of AI’s greatest strengths is scaling customization. For e-commerce, we can expect that analyzing a recurring customer’s habits will make the checkout experience even smoother. Instead of showing all payment methods the same way, they’ll be arranged based on the customer’s previous preferences.
Academic studies, such as this one by Rabhi Ouzayr and Esbai Redouane, also show that artificial intelligence supports every stage of the sales funnel—highlighting, among various strategies, the optimization of order bumps at checkout.
An order bump is when you encourage customers to add one more product to their cart before they complete their purchase. More than just encouraging your customer to discover another product, an order bump is a way to increase your e-commerce’s average order value. And with artificial intelligence, the recommendation of which products to suggest becomes much more personalized.
Using AI to Support Chat Commerce
In a country with 197 million Whatsapp users, merchants operating e-commerce in Brazil can no longer consider integration with the platform optional. This opportunity is leading many businesses to use chat commerce, which allows potential buyers to contact the store via WhatsApp to browse product catalogs, get questions answered, and complete their purchase—all without leaving the app to make a payment.
More than just an “automated customer service,” chat commerce enables the entire shopping experience to happen in a conversational and automated way—bringing scalability for online merchants and convenience for buyers.
PagBrasil, in partnership with technology company Suri, offers a chat commerce solution that uses artificial intelligence to boost e-commerce conversion rates by up to six times. According to Suri, their chat commerce uses AI to interpret messages from potential customers—including text, audio, and images—ensuring contextual automatic replies that help move the sales journey forward.
In addition, artificial intelligence makes it possible to detect abandoned carts in conversational commerce and automatically send reminders to users to complete their purchase.
PagBrasil at the Intersection of AI and E-Commerce
We’re in a promising moment for e-commerce entrepreneurs who are ready to integrate artificial intelligence into their operations. In addition to supporting internal processes and the customer journey, AI adds extra layers of protection to what you’ve built so far as a merchant.
Even so, there are still challenges for entrepreneurs when it comes to effectively implementing the various AI tools available today. These include:
- The cost of adding new technology solutions
- The learning curve involved in getting the team up to speed and making the most of new tools
- Ensuring that AI solutions comply with regulations like Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD)
What’s more, in August 2024, the Central Bank of Brazil announced the creation of a data science and artificial intelligence center to establish clear governance guidelines for the use of AI in processes involving the financial system.
Keeping up with the many tech innovations driven by AI—and making sure you’re using these solutions the right way—can feel like just one more thing weighing on your day-to-day as an e-commerce entrepreneur.
That’s where PagBrasil comes in—to be your tech partner and guide as you navigate the latest innovations in digital payments and e-commerce, all with the support of artificial intelligence.
We invite you to speak with our team of specialists to learn how your e-commerce can benefit from cutting-edge technology solutions that will help your business stand out in a market where innovation is increasingly key to staying ahead of the competition.
