If you sell across Latin America, there is no single "LATAM marketplace". There is MercadoLibre with six country portals, three large Brazilian destinations that do not agree on file format, a Mexican department-store marketplace that expects studio-grade assets, and a Chile-headquartered Seller Center that covers three Andean countries from one login.
This is a 2026 reference for sellers shipping into the LATAM stack — MercadoLibre per country (MLA/MLB/MLM/MLC/MPE/MCO), Americanas, Magalu, Casas Bahia, Liverpool Mexico, and Falabella across Chile, Peru and Colombia. The practical takeaway: one 1200 × 1200 pure-white JPG under 2 MB, delivered from a clean URL, clears every marketplace here. But each platform has subtleties, and "mostly compliant" is how rejections happen.
The LATAM split: Brazil vs HispanoAmérica
The biggest split in LATAM e-commerce is linguistic. Brazil is a pt-BR island of ~215 million people inside an otherwise Spanish-speaking region, and that split shows up in seller portals, search queries, support docs, invoice requirements, and the verbs sellers type into Google.
Brazilian sellers search for tirar fundo foto produto and fundo branco 1200x1200. Mexican sellers use quitar fondo foto producto. Argentine and Chilean sellers use eliminar fondo. These are not interchangeable — localized copy written as direct translation reads as machine-generated and sellers bounce.
Per-country seller hubs matter as much as language. MercadoLibre's authoritative policy lives on vendedores.mercadolibre.com.ar, .com.br, .com.mx, .cl, .com.pe, .com.co — the consolidated English reference at global-selling.mercadolibre.com is a secondary. Americanas, Magalu and Casas Bahia run Portuguese-only seller portals. Liverpool runs on a Mirakl deployment with a Mexico-specific portal. Falabella unifies three Spanish-speaking countries under one Seller Center, but each country still has its own tax ID, invoice system, and onboarding flow.
MercadoLibre: one rulebook, six country site IDs
MercadoLibre leads every LATAM country except Brazil, where it competes hand-to-hand with Amazon.com.br, Shopee BR, Magalu and Americanas. Six country "site IDs" do the heavy lifting:
- MLA — Argentina (es-AR),
vendedores.mercadolibre.com.ar - MLB — Brazil (pt-BR),
vendedores.mercadolivre.com.br - MLM — Mexico (es-MX),
vendedores.mercadolibre.com.mx - MLC — Chile (es-CL),
vendedores.mercadolibre.cl - MPE — Peru (es-PE),
vendedores.mercadolibre.com.pe - MCO — Colombia (es-CO),
vendedores.mercadolibre.com.co
Smaller markets — Uruguay (MLU), Venezuela (MLV), Ecuador (MEC), Bolivia (MBO) — share the core ruleset and funnel through regional hubs.
Canvas: 500 px long side / 50 px short side minimum, 1200 × 1200 square recommended, up to 10 MB per file, JPG or PNG. Aspect ratio is 1:1 — anything else letterboxes in the buyer UI and loses ranking weight. Up to 12 images per listing; six to eight is the sweet spot, apparel needs more. Brazil (MLB) publishes a 95%-fill rule in text; MLA and MLM expect 80%+ fill.
Background by category is where MercadoLibre breaks from uniform white. Fashion, tops, bottoms, dresses, footwear and "packs" (multi-unit listings) require a light-shade neutral — white, cream, light gray or beige. Home and furniture can use contextual room backgrounds on secondary images with a clean neutral main image. Electronics and general goods default to white or very light gray. The Brazilian portal explicitly says the white background should be "criado digitalmente com um editor de fotos" — digitally created with a photo editor. That is exactly what a background remover with a white-background export produces.
Prohibited on every main image, every country: watermarks, logos, store names, signatures, contact info, borders, QR codes, promo banners, arrows, callouts, promotional text ("oferta", "envío gratis", "nuevo modelo"). Sellers also cannot paste platform badges onto their own photos — MercadoLíder, Full, Más vendido and Oferta relámpago cannot appear as image overlays, even if your account qualifies. Those are rendered by MercadoLibre on top of the product card; putting them on the photo itself is a rules violation.
MercadoLíder tiers — Silver → Gold → Platinum — are earned primarily on sales volume and completion rates, but "publicaciones de calidad" / "listings with high-resolution quality images" is a listed ongoing quality signal that affects category search rank and "Más vendido" eligibility. The photo-quality rubric is qualitative, not a published pixel score — but in practice a Platinum account with a degraded catalog loses the tier.
Country gotchas: Brazil (MLB) requires ICMS nota fiscal setup (NCM/CEST/CFOP/CSOSN) before a listing can go live. Mexico (MLM) enforces NOM-050 labelling through Mercado Envíos Full — labels visible in photos must match what ships. Cross-border sellers using Global Selling inherit the strictest composite rule set, in practice MLB apparel. Full per-country specs on our MercadoLibre product photos page.
Americanas: the strict one
Americanas is the surviving umbrella post-2023 for the old Lojas Americanas + Submarino + Shoptime operation. The January 2023 accounting-fraud disclosure (reported at R$20B+) did real damage to seller trust; recovery through 2025–2026 has been partial. Americanas still sits in the BR top five by GMV but trails MercadoLivre, Shopee BR, Magalu and Amazon.com.br in seller-acquisition momentum.
On photos, Americanas is the strictest of the major Brazilian marketplaces:
- 800 × 800 minimum, 1200 × 1200 recommended, up to 2500 × 2500
- 1:1 square only — non-square rejected at upload
- JPG / JPEG / PNG; JPG strongly preferred because the next limit is tight
- 2 MB hard cap per image — this is the gotcha
- Pure white background required ("fundo branco")
- No marca d'água, no logomarca, no texto sobrescrito, no ambientalização (lifestyle shots), no fotos caseiras (amateur home snapshots), no ad-style composites, no detail-only main images
The 2 MB cap catches sellers by surprise. A lightly-compressed 2500 × 2500 PNG easily blows past 2 MB and many photo editors export at 4–8 MB by default. Sellers shooting RAW or exporting PNG commonly have to re-encode to JPG Q=85. The "no ambientalização" line is stricter than Magalu — Americanas does not want contextual secondaries, just clean multi-angle product shots on white.
Account prerequisites: CNPJ (MEI minimum), nota fiscal, a CNPJ-matched bank account, and EAN/UPC/GTIN codes enforced strictly post-2023. Commissions run 18–21% by category (widely cited, no single published schedule).
A single 1200 × 1200 white-background JPG under 2 MB satisfies Americanas, Magalu, Casas Bahia, MercadoLivre and Shopee BR simultaneously. Produce once, export five times. Full checklist on our Americanas product photos page.
Magalu: JPG-only and two-photo minimum
Magazine Luiza — Magalu — is the quiet winner of the 2023 Brazilian seller-trust flight. Fulfillment Magalu, the Magalupay fintech stack, and the Lu super-app give it real operational leverage. It has picked up share from Americanas and now sits as Brazil's most trusted pure-play 3P marketplace for SMBs.
Magalu has two idiosyncrasies no other LATAM marketplace shares:
- 900 × 900 minimum, 1200 × 1200 default recommendation, up to 2500 × 2500 on some integrations
- 1:1 square required
- JPG only — this is the one that trips up sellers with PNG assets
- 2 MB hard cap — same as Americanas, different rationale
- 2-photo minimum per listing — one photo gets rejected
- Background: white preferred, lifestyle secondaries allowed
The JPG-only policy is the notable divergence. Sellers with transparent-background PNG exports (the default of most background-remover tools) must flatten onto a white JPG canvas before upload — a one-click operation but easy to forget when every other marketplace accepts PNG. The two-photo minimum also means at least one "ângulos diferentes" secondary: a detail, a side view, or an in-use shot.
Account requirements mirror the Brazilian pattern: CNPJ (MEI minimum), nota fiscal, matching bank account, GTIN/EAN per category. Fulfillment Magalu is optional but growing — opted-in SKUs face physical-dimension limits (Σ dims ≤ 200 cm) and the two-photo minimum is enforced harder. Full spec on Magalu product photos.
Casas Bahia: looser on file size, stricter on URLs
Casas Bahia is the consumer-facing brand of the company formerly called Via S.A. (renamed Casas Bahia at the corporate level in 2023). The parent also operates Ponto Frio and the legacy Extra.com.br properties; marketplace support consolidated under suportemarketplace.viavarejo.com.br. Electronics, white goods and furniture are the center of gravity, and Boleto-based installment financing is a heavy conversion driver — often cited as why Casas Bahia retains share in categories where Magalu and MercadoLivre would otherwise take it.
Spec: 1000 × 1000 recommended, 500 px floor on one side, up to 2500 × 2500, 1:1 square, JPG/PNG, up to 10 MB per file (far more generous than Magalu or Americanas). White background preferred — "imagens registradas com qualidade profissional e preferencialmente com fundo branco".
The distinctive rule is URL hygiene. The Via Varejo integrator ingest requires a direct URL to the image file — no intermediate ad pages, no spaces or accents, no = or ? query parameters. Sellers using Dropbox, Google Drive or CMS-hosted assets with hashed query-string URLs will see uploads fail. A clean CDN-hosted JPG on a predictable filename sidesteps the problem entirely.
Commissions 18.5–21% by category, payment cadence three times per month (vs Magalu's typical two) — the cash-flow advantage is real. See Casas Bahia product photos.
Liverpool: Mexico's department-store bar
Liverpool Marketplace is operated by El Puerto de Liverpool (BMV: LIVEPOL), launched 2020, runs on Mirakl. Its premium-tier sibling is El Palacio de Hierro — a smaller department-store marketplace we could not retrieve a published spec for (assumed-similar but unverified).
Liverpool's photo bar is set by its own 1P studio photography. Practitioner convention across seller-education sources is 1000 × 1000 minimum and 1500 × 1500 recommended, 1:1 square, JPG or PNG. White background required — "product images on Liverpool must be on white background and have specific dimensions, along with universal codes (EAN, UPC, ITF)". File-size ceiling is not published in the public portal (unverified).
Account requirements: RFC (business tax ID), CURP for individuals, factura electrónica (CFDI), EAN/UPC/ITF per SKU, PROFECO / NOM-050 compliance on anything visible in the photo. Liverpool Fulfillment Services available for opted-in sellers.
The es-MX register matters on Liverpool more than elsewhere in LATAM. Department-store buyers expect formal editorial copy, not the casual register that reads fine on MercadoLibre or Amazon. Treat Liverpool as the premium MX tier: higher photo bar, formal register, stricter curation. See Liverpool product photos.
Falabella: one Seller Center, three Andean countries
Falabella Seller Center is the Spanish-speaking South America anchor — the only top-tier LATAM marketplace outside MercadoLibre that is not Brazil-focused. One login manages Chile (HQ, biggest GMV), Peru and Colombia. Siblings Sodimac (hardware) and Tottus (groceries) share the corporate parent but run on separate seller stacks. The 2018 Linio acquisition was fully integrated by 2023–2024; ex-Linio CL/PE/CO sellers were migrated into Seller Center with mostly-unchanged rules.
Canvas: 200 × 200 floor (very low — in practice shoot ≥ 1000), 1500 × 1500 recommended, 2000 × 2000 explicit maximum (tighter than most LATAM marketplaces — oversized images fail upload or get auto-downsampled), 1:1 square, JPG / PNG / GIF (GIF is unusual), file-size cap unverified.
Background required white, product centered, no watermarks, no logos, no promotional overlays, no sale banners, no blurry images. Falabella's help text: "El producto debe estar centrado, es importante no agregar datos extras como marca de agua, promociones o condiciones de venta, y evitar utilizar fotos borrosas o de mala calidad."
Prerequisites vary by country: RUT (CL), RUC (PE), NIT (CO), matching electronic-invoice capability (SII / SUNAT / DIAN), in-country bank account. Each country is a separate onboarding. Register differs — "polera" (CL) vs "camiseta" (PE/CO) — but photo verbs are stable: "fondo blanco", "foto producto", "eliminar fondo" (CL/CO) or "quitar fondo" (PE). See Falabella product photos.
Pro tips: one master file, many exports
Shoot once, export many. Capture at 2500 × 2500 or higher, remove the background with a free HD background remover, place the subject on a pure-white canvas at 95% fill, save the master as PNG. Derive exports:
- MercadoLibre (any country): 1200 × 1200 JPG, Q=90, typically 200–400 KB
- Americanas: 1200 × 1200 JPG, Q=85, under 2 MB
- Magalu: 1200 × 1200 JPG only (no PNG), under 2 MB, two photos minimum
- Casas Bahia: 1000 × 1000 JPG or PNG, clean URL without query parameters
- Liverpool MX: 1500 × 1500 JPG, match the 1P studio quality bar
- Falabella (CL/PE/CO): 1500 × 1500 JPG, never above 2000 × 2000
Vocabulary matters for SEO and conversion. Don't write catalog copy as literal translation. pt-BR sellers say "fundo branco" and "tirar fundo foto produto"; es-MX uses "fondo blanco" and "quitar fondo foto producto"; es-AR, es-CL and es-CO lean on "eliminar fondo". Cross-listing across pt-BR and es-* needs two copy tracks, not one translated track.
Disclose 3D renders. MercadoLibre flags listings using obvious 3D renders without disclosure — it triggers authenticity-review workflows that freeze listings. Real-photo-on-white is the expected default; CGI or AI-generated product images must be disclosed in the description.
Mobile is a 1:1 world. Every marketplace here renders mobile search results as 1:1 tiles. A 4:5 or 3:4 image gets cropped to square regardless of what you upload — shoot and export square from the start.
Ready to ship LATAM-compliant photos
The rules above are tedious but not hard. A single clean 1200 × 1200 white-background JPG under 2 MB gets you through every marketplace in this guide — the platform-specific details are variance at the edges, not entirely different workflows.
remove-bg.io is free, runs in your browser, has no signup, ships HD downloads without a watermark, and processes on-device so your catalog never leaves your machine. Upload a phone photo, pick a clean white background, export 1:1, and you are ready to list on MercadoLibre, Americanas, Magalu, Casas Bahia, Liverpool or Falabella the same afternoon. If your catalog is already on transparent PNG, one click flattens it for Magalu's JPG-only upload path.
