Cash-on-delivery in Latin America is not a single market. It is sixteen markets with sixteen different curves. Some are still expanding COD share. Some are flat. A small number are visibly compressing as digital wallets reach scale. This piece is the working snapshot we use internally at Fufills heading into 2026 — not a forecast, a state-of-play.
LATAM COD as a regional aggregate is still the dominant non-credit-card payment method in physical e-commerce, but the curve has flattened. The era of double-digit annual growth in COD share is over in the larger economies; growth now comes from category expansion (more SKUs sold COD, not more share of cart) and from the still-underpenetrated mid-size markets.
For cross-border merchants, this means three things:
- The big markets are about retention, not capture. Mexico, Brazil, Colombia: COD is mature. Winning here is about RTO, settlement, and operational consistency, not about being early.
- The mid-size markets are still capture-mode. Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Bolivia, the DR: COD share is still rising, infrastructure is still consolidating. Operators who establish lanes now lock in 3–5 years of compounding share.
- The wallet-pressure markets reward operational excellence. Where COD is being pressured by digital wallets (Argentina, Chile, parts of Brazil), the merchants who win on COD are the ones running hard-gated confirmation and a tight settlement cycle. Sloppy operators get squeezed out by the wallet first.
Mexico, Brazil, Colombia.
These three together represent the bulk of LATAM e-commerce volume. COD is well-established, carriers are mature (though not uniformly excellent), and adoption is high enough that opting out of COD costs the merchant material conversion.
Operational reality:
- COD share of total e-commerce orders: 35–55% depending on category and region inside the country.
- Average RTO without execution discipline: 28–38%.
- Average RTO with full execution stack: 12–18% (Fufills-internal, on accounts using the 5-step stack).
- Carrier landscape: 4–8 viable carriers per major lane. Multi-carrier execution is the operating norm.
For cross-border merchants, these are the markets where Fufills' core operational levers — confirmation, multi-carrier routing, reconciliation discipline — produce the largest absolute gain in delivered revenue.
Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia, Dominican Republic.
These markets are still building. COD share of cart is still climbing in most of them — sometimes from a high base, often from a medium base. E-commerce penetration is several years behind the band-1 markets, which means COD-friendly categories (consumer electronics accessories, beauty, health-and-wellness) are still net-expanding.
Operational reality:
- Carrier coverage is uneven; multi-carrier strategies require deeper local-knowledge work.
- RTO baselines without discipline run 30–45%, higher than band 1, because address informality is more pervasive.
- AOV bands are typically lower, which makes the margin sensitivity to RTO even sharper.
- COD share is still rising in 7 of 9 of these markets year-over-year.
The strategic point: for cross-border merchants, band-2 markets are where 2026–2028 share-of-cart is being set. Operators who establish lanes now ride a compounding curve.
Argentina, Chile.
The two LATAM markets where digital wallets and account-funded payments have reached material scale on e-commerce. COD is still significant — it has not collapsed — but the share-of-cart curve has bent down in both, and the next 36 months will see further compression.
Operational reality:
- Argentina: macroeconomic instability has historically kept COD attractive (cash hedges the peso), but wallet products have absorbed share among urban under-35 buyers.
- Chile: most mature digital-payments market in Spanish-speaking LATAM. COD share is shrinking in Santiago and Valparaíso, more stable in regional cities.
The implication for cross-border merchants is not "skip these markets." It is: the operators who survive in Argentina and Chile are the ones running the tightest execution. RTO discipline matters more here than in band 1. The 30-day-settlement operators get squeezed by wallet-funded competitors first.
Peru sits between band 1 and band 2 by volume, with growth characteristics closer to band 2. COD share is still high (low-50s on physical e-commerce categories), AOV bands are wider than the Central America cluster, and the carrier landscape is consolidated around 3–4 viable national operators plus regional last-mile networks. Peru is the country where cross-border merchants most often underestimate the available volume.
The only country in the 16-country footprint where Fufills is a registered local merchant (FUFILLS LLC, SURI 1639264-0010). COD share in PR is structurally lower than mainland LATAM because the US-dollar-denominated card economy is stronger, but COD remains material — particularly in non-San Juan zones and for new-buyer cohorts. PR is also the natural test-market for a merchant who wants USD-denominated learning before scaling into mainland LATAM.
Three operational priorities we are seeing work across the book:
Priority 1 — pick a launch pair, not a launch country. A single-country launch undersizes the operational fixed cost. A 3-country launch overshoots. The pattern that works: one band-1 country (volume capture, training the operations) + one band-2 country (capture the rising curve early). Mexico + Guatemala, Colombia + Ecuador, Brazil + DR.
Priority 2 — measure RTO before measuring AOV. Most merchants entering LATAM optimize AOV first. They should optimize RTO first. A 25% RTO at $50 AOV is worse than a 12% RTO at $40 AOV on net-delivered revenue. The order matters.
Priority 3 — settle the contract, not the spreadsheet. The single biggest mistake we see cross-border merchants make is signing with an operator whose financial structure cannot reach their bank. A merchant in Casablanca needs USD, not pesos. That is the three-jurisdiction trust model problem, and it is a contract problem, not a logistics problem.
Sources we cross-check against include carrier-published volume reports, country-level e-commerce association data, and our own observed performance across the 16-country footprint. Where our internal numbers diverge from public benchmarks, we report both.