E-commerce app data to prepare for LATAM's Q4 2026 shopping season

In 2025, Latin America's retail e-commerce sales reached $191.25 billion, up 12.2% year-over-year (YoY), making it the world's fastest-growing e-commerce region for the first time since 2021. Adjust's Mobile app trends spotlight edition: LATAM 2026 report shows the same story at the app level: e-commerce app installs and sessions across the region grew 17% and 30% YoY in 2025.

With Q4 2026 on the horizon, the biggest period for shopping app growth, last year's events give marketers a dry run for what's coming. In this blog, we dive into what installs and sessions looked like around those events, and what it means for campaign timing and measurement this time around.

Overall, e-commerce app growth clustered around major shopping events. Installs climbed 15% above average in July, when Amazon Prime Day happened. By Q4, events like Buen Fin, Black Friday, and the holiday season pushed sessions 23% above average in November and 32% above average in December. January 2026 kept the momentum going, with installs up 23% and sessions up 16% against the Q1 average. 

Adjust's regional data on installs and sessions around 2025's major shopping events shows that Colombia had the sharpest Black Friday session spike compared to the month's average, at 54%, with Chile close behind at 52% and Peru at 51%. Chile's installs also jumped 19% that week, and its Cyber Monday sessions added another 30%. Brazil's installs rose 26% and sessions rose 37% on Black Friday alone. Outside the US-style calendar, Mexico's El Buen Fin drove a 20% install lift and 26% session lift, and Argentina's Cyber Wow pushed sessions up 31%.

During a surge like Black Friday or El Buen Fin, a shopper who has to hunt for what they want is a shopper about to leave. This matters more now, because there are more entry points to shopping apps, including social media platforms.

TikTok Shop launched in Mexico in February 2025 and in Brazil that May, with live shopping and checkout built directly in. Meta has been expanding its WhatsApp Business AI, a shopping assistant built into chat, to more businesses in Mexico.Instagram and TikTok are also an increasingly common place for a shopping trip to start, and Research and Markets expects the region's social commerce market to keep growing at more than 10% a year through 2031.

Bruno Lopes, TikTok's Head of Sales for Brazil, made a related point in our report. He said that in a region where "conversion paths are not linear," advertisers need to move past last-click attribution and toward something closer to full-funnel measurement.

With Adjust Measure, marketers can track a shopper's path across channels and devices, so they can see which one actually drove the sale instead of crediting whichever channel happens to close it last, meaning budget goes toward what's actually converting. TrueLink, Adjust's deep linking solution handles the rest, routing that same shopper straight to the product or offer they clicked, instead of a generic home screen.

Want the full breakdown? Download Mobile app trends spotlight edition: LATAM 2026 for country-level benchmarks across finance, gaming, and more. If you want to see how Adjust's measurement and deep linking solutions could work for your app, request a demo.