LATAM powers a new end-to-end cross-border e-commerce business on Shipsy

LATAM powers a new end-to-end cross-border e-commerce business on Shipsy

LATAM Cargo — the freight arm of Latin America’s largest airline group — launched a new end-to-end cross-border e-commerce business on Shipsy and immediately reduced control-tower manpower by 50–60%, saved 5–10% of working hours, and cut vehicle preparation and loading time by ~25%. For a cargo operation that moves 500,000+ tonnes of freight annually on behalf of a $12–13B USD revenue group, those numbers represent a shift from reactive operations to proactive ones.

Customer: LATAM Cargo. Industry: Freight forwarder / cross-border CEP. Region: Latin America. Shipsy modules deployed: White-label TMS + Tracking Page, Merchant Portal, Native Pickup & Delivery Mobile Apps, Hub & Middle-Mile Modules, Autonomous Control Tower (Atlas). Headline metric: ~50–60% reduction in control-tower manpower, 5–10% working-hour savings, ~25% reduction in vehicle prep/loading time.

The challenge: building a cross-border e-commerce stack from scratch

LATAM Cargo set out to launch a new end-to-end cross-border e-commerce business — the kind of shipper-friendly, label-to-doorstep product that competes with global CEP networks. The challenge was that the starting state had most of the hard problems still unsolved.

There was no single end-to-end LATAM label or visibility layer. Local “mic tracking” workflows produced inconsistent customer experience and SLA ambiguity — a shipment crossing multiple countries might have three different tracking narratives. The existing cargo system wasn’t integrated for the MVP, which meant middle-mile visibility had gaps that cascaded into last-mile confusion.

Last-mile was deeply fragmented. Scaling beyond São Paulo required integration with 10–40+ local delivery providers — and each carrier integration cost ~3–4 weeks of effort. At that integration cost, scaling to national coverage, let alone cross-border, was mathematically unfeasible on a sensible timeline.

LATAM needed a platform that could: ingest a single e-commerce label, orchestrate across carriers and middle-mile legs with minimal integration cost, and give the control tower a way to catch exceptions before customers did.

The solution: single-label TMS + low-friction carrier onboarding + Atlas

Shipsy deployed a single-label, white-label TMS plus tracking page and merchant portal — the consumer-facing layer that gives end customers and shipper merchants one coherent view of the shipment from first-mile to final-mile, regardless of how many carriers or legs are involved under the hood.

Native mobile apps for pickup and delivery were the key unlock on carrier integration cost. Small local providers often don’t have APIs — and waiting 3–4 weeks per carrier for a custom integration wasn’t viable. Shipsy’s native apps let small providers come online by installing a mobile app, not by building a backend integration. Onboarding time collapses from weeks to days. For an operation scaling beyond São Paulo to 10–40+ local providers, that’s the difference between a 6-month and a 18-month rollout.

Hub and middle-mile modules cover bagging, trip creation, and milestone tracking across the line-haul legs — so the middle-mile stops being a visibility black hole and becomes first-class operational data.

The autonomous control tower (Shipsy Atlas) is the decision layer. It doesn’t just visualize exceptions — it detects incidents automatically and proposes next-best actions. When a load is at risk, Atlas surfaces the exception with context, owner assignment, and a recommended action, rather than letting it sit in a dashboard waiting for a human to spot it.

The combination of white-label shipper-facing tooling, low-friction carrier apps, middle-mile visibility, and an autonomous control tower is what allowed LATAM to launch the cross-border e-commerce product in a realistic timeframe.

The outcome: 50–60% fewer control-tower heads

Control-tower manpower is down 50–60%. That’s not a minor productivity gain — it’s the signature of moving from a reactive, eyes-on-glass control tower to an autonomous one. When Atlas auto-detects incidents and proposes next-best actions, control-tower ops move from being dashboard-watchers to being exception-resolvers.

5–10% of working hours saved across operations. Those hours came from auto-incident detection, standardized middle-mile workflows, and the elimination of manual coordination across local carriers.

Vehicle preparation and loading time down ~25%. Hub operations — bagging, sorting, trip creation — run on Shipsy’s Hub Ops workflows now, replacing the ad-hoc processes that used to govern vehicle prep.

A shift from reactive to proactive operations. That’s the qualitative outcome, and it’s the one that matters most for a new cross-border product: LATAM catches exceptions before customers do, resolves them with clear ownership, and runs the network at a tempo a legacy control tower couldn’t match.

For a business scaling beyond São Paulo with 10–40+ local providers in play, this combination of outcomes is what makes cross-border e-commerce economically viable at LATAM’s operating scale.

What’s next

LATAM continues expanding Shipsy’s footprint across the network — more local providers onboarded via native apps, deeper Atlas automation in the control tower, and tighter integration between the shipper-facing merchant portal and the operational backend. The longer-term goal: a cross-border e-commerce product where the platform handles routine orchestration and humans focus on network design and customer experience.