Abstract
This article examines how Latin American third-party sellers on Mercado Libre—the region's largest e-commerce platform—internalize and manage risk through practices aligned with Neff's (2012) concept of venture labor. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with sellers based in Chile, we explore how individuals navigate economic precarity and algorithmic uncertainty by mobilizing specific strategies and resources. We identify three risk management strategies: financial, creative, and actuarial. The financial strategy frames platform work as an investment for achieving economic independence; the creative strategy emphasizes personal reinvention, branding, and visibility; and the actuarial strategy involves anticipating trends and ensuring long-term business viability. These strategies are shaped by platform-specific conditions. Sellers view Mercado Libre as safer and more legitimate than alternatives like Facebook Marketplace, offering formalized transactions and greater visibility—yet also requiring constant adaptation to opaque algorithms and performance metrics. To support these strategies, sellers draw on a mix of formal and informal resources. These include official training programs, YouTube tutorials, peer learning networks, and relationships with intermediaries. Networking—both online and in person—emerges as a key resource, helping sellers exchange knowledge, gain visibility, and mitigate uncertainty. This article makes three contributions to platform labor research. First, it updates the concept of venture labor by highlighting how algorithmic infrastructures shape risk-taking. Second, it shows how risk is being redefined in post-pandemic Latin America. Third, it situates venture labor in the Global South, emphasizing the cultural and institutional specificities that shape entrepreneurial labor on digital platforms like Mercado Libre.
Introduction
In a report published by the Data & Society Research Institute, Moira Weigel describes the experiences of independent “third-party” (3P) sellers on Amazon in the USA and China (Weigel, 2023). 3P sellers, Weigel argues, have been critical in building Amazon's retail business over the previous decades. Amazon has consistently introduced a series of services, regulations, and practices that have enabled it to produce new business models. The result is that “Amazon has not hurt or helped small businesses so much as transformed them, turning traditional forms of commerce into something more akin to day trading” (Weigel, 2023: 1).
A fundamental piece of the process of redefining small business has been the introduction of a specific business practice: externalizing an essential part of risk onto sellers. Over the past two decades, risk has been “privatized” in the sense attributed by Neff (2012): not only has work become riskier, but individual workers have also adopted this process, as risk has become more attractive to them or, more commonly, has been imposed out of necessity in contexts of labor vulnerability. In this process, workers have assumed some of the responsibilities traditionally filled by their employers.
In this paper, we argue that “risk privatization” (Neff, 2012) is not an isolated event but rather a constitutive feature of the platform economy and work in tech-related industries (Schor et al., 2024; van Doorn, 2024). We examine how Latin American third-party sellers internalize and manage risk in their work, in a context of growing insecurity, informality, and precarity exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on Neff's (2012) concept of “venture labor” and recent work on risk management in platform economies, we analyze the strategies and resources employed by 17 third-party sellers based in Chile to mitigate risk on Mercado Libre, Latin America's largest online marketplace. We situate this process of risk privatization within the broader context of recent labor-market transformations in the region.
Our study shows that sellers internalize risk through three interconnected sets of strategies: financial, creative, and actuarial. The rise of platform-mediated commerce in Chile has not only privatized risk but also normalized and moralized it. Sellers come to understand uncertainty, instability, and self-reliance not simply as economic necessities but as morally appropriate responses to a context marked by institutional fragility, informality, and the effects of political and social crises. This moralization of risk shapes how sellers make sense of their work, frame their trajectories, and justify their choices within a volatile platform environment. Rather than resisting or contesting precarity, they often recast it as an opportunity to demonstrate resilience, responsibility, and entrepreneurial worth.
We consider the resources they draw on to build networks with other sellers and intermediaries, sharing knowledge about the platform and its algorithms. By examining venture labor dynamics in a Global South context, we offer new perspectives on risk privatization as a constitutive process of the platform economy.
Risk and the platform economy
Theorizing venture labor
Considering Silicon Alley during the 2000s, Neff (2012) coined the term “venture labor” to describe how workers managed and internalized risk in their working lives, a phenomenon she defined as the “privatization” of risk. In Neff's terms: Venture labor is the investment of time, energy, human capital, and other personal resources that ordinary employees make in the companies where they work. Venture labor is the explicit expression of entrepreneurial values by nonentrepreneurs. Venture labor refers to an investment by employees into their companies or how they talk about their time at work as an investment. (Neff, 2012: 16)
More broadly, Neff (2012) claims that framing risk as desirable became one of the most enduring legacies of the dot-com boom. Risk had a very specific meaning in this context: it represented an opportunity available to those willing to take it, with both financial and reputational rewards effectively guaranteed. Risk charted the path toward potential professional gain. This shift made it common for workers to incorporate risk into their personal narratives about their decisions, regardless of the likelihood of those risks succeeding, and even when those risks were evident as poor choices.
According to Neff, venture labor comprises two key components: strategies and resources. Neff identified three risk management strategies, with implications for how workers conduct self-assessments of their work. The financial strategy frames risk as a profitable investment, interpreting it in strictly economic terms, with the anticipated outcome being financial success and other nonmonetary gains. The creative strategy emphasizes the notion that there is “nothing to lose” in taking risks. It typically focuses on the “content” of the risk, so to speak, and aims to achieve success, visibility, and reputation. Finally, the actuarial strategy emphasizes managing career longevity, “calculating the degree of riskiness for each position, project and company and then seeking safe heavens from the volatility by staying keenly focused on career longevity” (Neff, 2012: 88).
In addition to strategies, the second component of venture labor is resources, the assets or tools that workers employ to achieve these strategies. For example, Neff theorized networking as a resource “needed for building a flexible workforce and sharing in the economic uncertainty of the industry” (Neff, 2012: 107). As a key resource in Silicon Alley, networking became a way to distribute risk.
Risk privatization in the platform economy
In this paper, we build on the work of platform economy scholars to argue that risk privatization is a crucial feature of the platform economy (Schor et al., 2024; van Doorn, 2024). Several studies have begun to demonstrate the effectiveness of a risk-focused approach in understanding various aspects of this economy (Blyth et al., 2024; Shevchuk and Strebkov, 2015). Considering Upwork's business model, Popiel showed that freelancers tend to equate success with risk: “this framing invokes neoliberal discourses championing the creative economy, in which anyone can reap substantial financial and reputational rewards, provided he or she embraces the attendant risks and adopts an entrepreneurial drive” (Popiel, 2017: 222). Similarly, researchers interested in the content creator economy have explored how individuals tend to incorporate risk into their pursuit of public visibility. This process has proven particularly vulnerable for women and other marginalized groups, as it involves harms ranging from identity-based hate and harassment to take-down campaigns (Duffy et al., 2024).
Schor et al. (2024) have shown that an entrepreneurial mindset is key to embracing risk in platform work, rather than resisting it. As Cutolo and Kenney (2021) explain, this is because tech companies promote the notion that platforms benefit aspiring entrepreneurs by offering low entry barriers, ready-made infrastructure, and access to large consumer markets that would otherwise be difficult to reach. However, this form of entrepreneurship is also saturated with vulnerabilities, as platform control seems nearly unilateral: tech companies can monitor every aspect of sellers’ operations, change participation terms at will, and even suspend accounts for reasons that are opaque or poorly understood. As a result, platform “entrepreneurs” must contend not only with the traditional risks of building a business but also with a distinct form of risk tied to their dependence on platforms themselves (Cutolo and Kenney, 2021). Duffy et al. (2024) thus coined the term “platform vulnerabilities” to refer to risks explicitly associated with platform work, including physical, financial, and epistemic risks that result, in part, from algorithm-generated uncertainty (Gregory, 2020). For the case of delivery workers, their lack of knowledge about algorithmic decisions creates conditions where “workers are fundamentally unsure about the rules of work” (Gregory, 2020: 327). For content creators, studies suggest that platforms utilize epistemic authority to prompt them to question their understanding of algorithms, thereby avoiding public scrutiny of their technological operations (Cotter, 2023).
To be sure, risk carries a very particular meaning in the Latin American context. Bensusán and Santos summarize the regional conditions that shape this specific understanding of risk: Platform work threatens to further informalize the already highly informal labour markets in Latin America and to further increase already high levels of inequality. This further informalization will result in a growing percentage of the working population living in conditions of insecurity since informal workers are not covered by social security arrangements such as unemployment benefits, pensions or sickness benefits, which are often linked to formal employment in Latin America. (Bensusán and Santos, 2021: 237)
A key conclusion from existing research on platform work in Latin America and abroad is that individuals adopt concrete strategies and tactics to manage risk. Workers develop individual strategies to minimize risks and draw on resources to negotiate them within larger communities and groups (Gregory and Maldonado, 2020). For instance, delivery workers forge “communities of support” (Gregory, 2020) to exchange information and make decisions about their work. Content creators employ filtering mechanisms to screen and remove abusive language before it becomes publicly visible (Duffy et al., 2024). This includes extensive forms of self-censorship. Other strategies aim to mitigate risk after the content has already been published online.
Another common strategy is collaboration among workers (Stecher et al., 2025). As Gray and Suri point out, “workers’ penchant for collaboration also highlights how the presence and effort of people behind the scenes are the true currency and value of this labor market” (Gray and Suri, 2019: 123). Gray and Suri argue that these strategies help to restore humanity in vulnerable work conditions. Grohmann and collaborators have shown that Latin America, in particular, must be understood through the lens of worker solidarity, which calls for seeing the region not only as a site of exploitation and informality but also as a space of claims for digital sovereignty and autonomy (Grohmann, 2025; Grohmann and Costa Barbosa, 2025).
Context: Mercado Libre and the platform economy in Chile
Our paper examines the specific case of Chile, a country that presents ideal conditions for analyzing the privatization of risk in the context of platform labor. Until 2019, Chile experienced high levels of institutional stability, widespread Internet penetration, and consistent GDP growth alongside increasing per capita income (Arriagada et al., 2023). However, that year marked a turning point. What began as student protests against a subway fare hike in Santiago escalated into nationwide demonstrations, both peaceful and violent, exposing deep-seated structural issues (Woods, 2022).
Although triggered by a seemingly isolated event, the protests quickly evolved into a broader social movement demanding changes in response to Chile's severe income inequality, inadequate pensions, and deficiencies in public healthcare and education (Cox et al., 2023). The demonstrations were marked by intense violence: while some protesters engaged in looting and vandalism, the state's response, characterized by police brutality and poor crisis management, further intensified public unrest, prolonging the mobilizations (Somma et al., 2020). The protests, transport disruptions, and episodes of localized violence created a heightened sense of insecurity in public space, particularly for those who depended on physical shops or street-based commerce. For many small retailers, the unpredictability of protest-related interruptions—from reduced foot traffic to sudden closures—made traditional forms of commerce increasingly difficult to sustain. Under these conditions, home-based and platform-mediated work appeared as safer and more controllable alternatives, reinforcing the shift toward digitally organized forms of labor.
Amid this social turmoil, Chile's gig economy and e-commerce sectors expanded significantly, a process further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Latin America, services such as food home delivery, supermarket shopping, and courier and parcel delivery increased by 209%, 259%, and 141%, respectively, between February and June 2020 (IDB Lab, 2021). This growth had significant implications for the reconfiguration of the labor force. Between 2019 and 2021, approximately 189,100 individuals earned income through digital platforms, accounting for 2.1% of the national workforce. This growth coincided with an increased reliance on digital services by consumers: approximately 3.3 million households, roughly 10 million people, utilized delivery, ride-hailing, or online shopping platforms during this period (Arriagada et al., 2023).
According to Fuentes and González (2025), Chile's labor force between 2021 and 2024 consisted of approximately 9–10 million workers. Jobs mediated by digital platforms comprised a small but increasing share of total employment, ranging from 1% to 2.3%. During the same period, labor informality, defined by the National Statistics Office as employment lacking formal contracts or social security contributions, increased from 26.7% to 28.2%, with a more pronounced rise among women (from 27.6% to 30.0%) (Fuentes and González, 2025). Recent data from Chile's National Institute of Statistics confirm this trend, estimating that 205,731 people (2.3% of the employed population) reported platform work as their primary occupation in the second quarter of 2022. Between September 2020 and June 2022, the number of platform workers increased by 54% (Arriagada et al., 2023).
The expansion of the e-commerce sector is also reflected in macroeconomic indicators. Chile's Central Bank e-commerce index (IVOCM) increased by nearly 400% between 2020 and 2021 (Banco Central de Chile, 2024). Similarly, the number of businesses registered with the internal tax system's electronic sales receipt system doubled in the same period (Servicio de Impuestos Internos, 2025). These indicators show how the pandemic accelerated both consumer adoption of online commerce and firms’ transition to platform-based business models.
Labor conditions within platform work also evolved during this period. In early 2020, 80.54% of digital platform workers were considered informal. This rate decreased over time, dropping to 65.31% in 2021 and further to 56.32% by the third quarter of 2023. Nevertheless, most platform workers remained independent contractors, accounting for between 72% and 80% of workers from late 2020 through mid-2023. The two most recent records indicate a return to even higher levels of self-employment, with 83.10% and 81.16% of workers categorized as independent in the second and third quarters of 2023, respectively (Arriagada et al., 2024).
The pandemic's economic impact also drove many formally employed individuals into platform work. As of the early 2020s, nearly 3% of the Chilean labor force was engaged in platform-mediated sectors such as transportation, delivery, and e-commerce, often using platforms like Mercado Libre (Fuentes and González, 2022). However, a regulatory gap persists: while 15% of digital jobs involve labor platforms like Uber, the remaining 85% involve commercial platforms used to sell goods and services, such as Mercado Libre, Instagram, or WhatsApp. As Law N° 21.431 applies only to the former, a significant portion of platform workers remains unprotected by existing labor legislation, highlighting the fragmented nature of regulatory oversight in Chile's platform economy.
What emerges is a coherent narrative: the rise of e-commerce is not only a story of technological adoption but also one of institutional fragmentation. Platforms like Mercado Libre partially formalize informal commerce—through traceable payments, logistics systems, and standardized transactions—while simultaneously introducing new instabilities related to algorithmic visibility, reputation systems, and changing participation rules (Duffy et al., 2024; van Doorn, 2024). In this environment, sellers must individually manage risks that are structurally produced, illustrating how the platform economy in Chile expands opportunities while deepening precarity.
Mercado Libre
Founded in 1999, Mercado Libre (which can be translated into English as “free market”) has established itself as the primary online sales platform in many countries in Latin America, serving as the main source of income for 1,858,528 families and generating 234,000 new jobs in 2023 (Mercado Libre, 2023). By the early 2020s, Mercado Libre had become the fourth-largest Latin American company by market capitalization (Franco et al., 2024). It currently operates in 18 Latin American countries, using its own technological platform but relying in part on Amazon Web Services to support its operations (Atzeni and Filipetto, 2025). In 2024, Mercado Libre reported net revenue of $21 billion and surpassed $51.5 billion in gross merchandise volume. That same year, the company achieved a net profit of $1.911 billion, up from $987 million in 2023, an improvement of 93.6% (EFE, 2025). Chile is no exception to this impact (Webretailer, 2023). Mercado Libre's substantial growth in the country has marked a significant shift in market dynamics, as it claimed the lion's share of the local market (Barrientos, 2020).
The onset of the pandemic further accelerated this growth, with consumer and market sentiment indicating the displacement of established local retail giants such as Falabella, Ripley, and Cencosud by Mercado Libre's formidable presence (Cadem, 2023). Franco and colleagues attribute this economic success to a series of specific factors: Mercado Libre operates in an industry in which Latin America does not have comparative advantages and yet functions with state-of-the-art technologies. Even with its dependence on foreign digital technologies, the company [has] developed capabilities to adapt and adopt them. (Franco et al., 2024: 431)
Method
Data for this project come from in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in 2022 with 17 third-party sellers based in Santiago, Chile. In line with previous studies (Grohmann et al., 2022; Purcell and Brook, 2020), the interviews provided valuable insights into how third-party sellers manage and internalize risk. Our sample consisted of 8 women and 9 men, 13 of whom were Chilean and 4 from other Latin American countries (Venezuela and Colombia, respectively) (see Table 1). Their ages ranged from 24 to 55 (mean = 40), and at the time of fieldwork, they were all residing in Santiago, Chile. In terms of education, only 6 out of 17 reported being students or having completed university studies, and their previous jobs ranged from store salespeople to teachers, accountants, dentists, and executives in the financial sector. As sellers, they have been using Mercado Libre for 2–10 years (mean = 4), 7 interviewees started using it since the pandemic, and 12 out of 17 were working full-time. The products they sell range from pet supplies and sports items to music records, antiques, toys, technology, hygiene products, shoes, and books. At the time of fieldwork, all research participants used Mercado Libre as their primary platform for selling products, along with Instagram and Facebook Marketplace.
Research participants’ information.
While the size of the sample does not allow for formal subgroup comparisons, we observed consistent patterns: younger sellers, often with unstable employment histories, tended to frame platform work as an opportunity for flexibility and upward mobility. Older sellers, particularly those who had previously managed physical stores or held more stable jobs disrupted by the 2019 social crisis or the pandemic, emphasized stability, securing income, and the need to “start over.” These background differences influenced how participants interpreted risk and shaped their adoption of platform strategies.
Research participants were contacted on Mercado Libre, where a message was left describing the research objective and inviting them to participate in an interview. Considering the platform does not allow sellers to exchange contact details, it was challenging to move off the platform. However, all participants are active sellers on other platforms, such as Facebook Marketplace or Instagram, so they shared their contacts there (to avoid Mercado Libre's control rules). Once we had access to communicate with them outside Mercado Libre, interviews were conducted on Zoom and recorded with participants’ consent. The average interview duration was 65 min. Topics covered in the interviews included participants’ backgrounds and expertise, work trajectories, experiences as sellers in Mercado Libre, and relationships with visibility, reputation, and algorithms on the platform.
Interviews were transcribed and coded (both manually and using Dedoose) using a grounded theory approach (Corbin and Strauss, 2015). All names of interviewees were anonymized. First, the research team identified the main categories explored in the interviews: learning and adaptation, building and maintaining a community, reputation, visibility, and relations with the platform. Second, after that round of analysis, the categories were refined, and we defined 12 codes into three categories, informed by the data and the theoretical review: “strategies and resources” related to venture labor, as well as “processes of internalization of risk.” Each code addressed issues related to managing advertising, living with algorithms and uncertainty, process automation and depersonalization, reciprocity and learning communities, resilience against algorithms, positioning on the platform, finding technological partners and consumer niches, costs, and building reputation.
Risk privatization strategies on Mercado Libre
Although many of the workers we interviewed sell products across multiple platforms, most expressed a clear preference for Mercado Libre, which they perceive as offering more opportunities and tools to support their business goals. Interviewees emphasized the platform's ability to provide greater product visibility than other e-commerce sites, along with the convenience of its integrated payment system, Mercado Pago, which facilitates smooth, secure transactions. Many sellers also view Mercado Libre as a safer environment for conducting business, especially compared with platforms like Facebook Marketplace, where the risk of scams is higher, and there is limited ability to trace or back up customer interactions. This search for security must be understood within the context of precarity and volatility that characterizes Latin American economies, as explained in the previous sections.
Beyond these practical advantages, sellers view Mercado Libre as a source of autonomy, allowing them to manage their time and work on their terms. In this way, Mercado Libre reinforces the notion that a non-entrepreneur can become an entrepreneur, a key step in initiating the process of risk privatization (Cutolo and Kenney, 2021; Neff, 2012). For some, Mercado Libre serves as a complementary source of income alongside other jobs; for others, it represents a pathway to launching and formalizing their businesses. As one interviewee (a 50-year-old woman) describes it: “Mercado Libre is my partner. I build my strategy around it.” This account sheds light on how sellers engage with Mercado Libre and, in doing so, reveal the strategies, aspirations, and resources that shape venture labor within platform economies.
Aligned with Neff's (2012) approach to venture labor, we identified three strategies that Chilean sellers on Mercado Libre typically employ to manage risk: financial, creative, and actuarial.
Financial
First, sellers framed risk management in financial terms. Neff (2012) demonstrates how venture laborers confront risk by viewing labor as a high-risk investment that may ultimately yield substantial rewards. As noted earlier, Neff's framing of risk as beneficial must be understood in the economic and technological context that characterized places like Silicon Alley in the 1990s and early 2000s. In contrast, post-pandemic Chile created very different conditions for embracing risk. Instead of offering the immediate gains that attracted Silicon Alley workers, Chilean sellers on Mercado Libre accepted risk as a way to cope with job loss, unstable work environments, and an uncertain economic future, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In short, risk did not signify a potential professional gain but rather a direct threat to people's livelihoods. The primary motivation for starting to sell on Mercado Libre was thus to meet basic needs. Some started during the pandemic to have more sources of income, while others began after being laid off. A 34-year-old woman framed it in binary terms: it was either Mercado Libre or losing her home. For her, risk did not refer to investing capital in hopes of higher returns, but rather to seeking a survival mechanism in an economic context with limited employment opportunities. In her words, “The pandemic came about, and I was unemployed, and also my mom was sick, so I needed to look for a job that didn’t require me to go out on the streets.” Embracing risk thus felt less like a choice or an investment than a necessity.
However, as van Doorn (2024) reminds us, managing risk in platform work is always entangled in the tension between the opportunities it offers and the threats it entails. The appeal of Mercado Libre extended beyond mere income generation. Within a financial logic, the incentive is also framed around benefits that can be nonmonetary, such as autonomy and low entrance requirements. Our interviewees often highlighted precisely these benefits. As a 36-year-old woman expressed: “I wasn’t able to work in my area, and then the whole online business thing showed up. I was earning more than in the job area I had studied for, and it allowed me more flexibility.” These words begin to illustrate how the financial logic of risk privatization intertwines with the adoption of an entrepreneurial mindset. From this perspective, taking on risk allows individuals not only to earn money but also to feel like creators of their own business, which they could manage as they see fit. At Mercado Libre, this strategy is evident among sellers who stated they joined the platform to achieve economic independence. Many interviewees reported that they started selling products on Mercado Libre to achieve financial freedom and gain control over their time. Through the lens of “entrepreneurship,” many interviewees framed the pandemic as an “opportunity” to “reinvent themselves” and their working conditions through platform work.
Third-party sellers viewed Mercado Libre as a promising alternative to their previous, inherently unstable employment arrangements, worsened by the pandemic. Despite limited insight into its operational dynamics, sellers were willing to take on the risk of transitioning to this new business model. Few other options offered the kind of relative security that online sales provided during the pandemic. Moreover, this willingness was driven by their perception of working for the company as an opportunity to attain higher income.
Unlike the Silicon Alley workers described by Neff (2012), Chilean sellers operate without the institutional infrastructures—such as venture capital, stock-based compensation, or stable professional networks—that made risk appear convertible into future opportunity. In this context, risk is less an investment in possible upward mobility than a mechanism for coping with unemployment, income loss, and limited labor-market alternatives during the pandemic. Although some sellers adopt entrepreneurial languages of “reinvention” or “autonomy,” these narratives coexist with structural constraints that restrict the very possibility of transforming risk into long-term economic or reputational gain. As a result, risk-taking in Chile is marked not by the promise of professional advancement but by ambivalence: workers internalize risk while navigating a platform environment that offers partial formalization yet introduces new algorithmic and reputational instabilities.
Creative
Second, sellers also managed risk through what Neff (2012) calls “creative” strategies, most notably by becoming visible to buyers on Mercado Libre. As Neff (2012) observes, venture laborers also mitigate risk by focusing on their projects and maintaining control over their development. Workers who employ this strategy often prioritize the challenges and creative endeavors inherent in their entrepreneurial pursuits.
Aligned with this strategy, many interviewees described their selling endeavors on Mercado Libre as a constantly evolving project that requires ongoing planning and adaptation to the ever-changing online market to succeed. Mercado Libre offered them the opportunity to adopt a mindset in which risk is inherent to the entrepreneur's identity and was therefore embraced as a means of creatively navigating moments of crisis (Cutolo and Kenney, 2021). Framed in this way, selling on Mercado Libre becomes a personal creative project over which individuals could exercise creative control. Thus, a 45-year-old woman described selling on the platform as an opportunity for simultaneous personal and business renewal: “The most important thing when it comes to e-commerce is for sales to be quick and expeditious, aside from constantly renovating yourself.” This statement reveals how the mandate to privatize risk carries with it the internationalization of an entire imaginary of notions typically associated with entrepreneurship.
As a creative strategy, risk privatization was viewed as a personal project that enabled the expression of emotional and affective aspects not suited to other forms of work. For a 55-year-old woman we interviewed, assuming risk during the pandemic became a means to explore an area of personal knowledge that she had kept out of work: “I ended up in the fitness products business because of the pandemic, I like working out, so I knew that field pretty well.” From a creative standpoint, Mercado Libre provided an opportunity for personal “reinvention.” The experience of a 31-year-old man is particularly illustrative: I am a dentist, but when I was a student, I started getting involved in business by selling car parts. This gave me the opportunity to become acquainted with Mercado Libre, and eventually, I began selling products directly related to my profession, such as toothbrushes, mouthwash, and other oral hygiene items.
Similarly, other interviewees viewed the risk of selling on Mercado Libre as an opportunity to cultivate a reputation. They saw this as a sign of high-quality entrepreneurship, attributing their potential success to the provision of well-rated services on the platform. A 50-year-old man explained how the pursuit of reputation on the platform operated: Reputation is the most important thing in the application. If there's a complaint, the platform will give you two days to solve it before it affects you, so you have to do the impossible to solve it. In many cases, you lose money, and it might even be the client's fault, but you have to endure those losses.
In Mercado Libre, reputation is measured by seller reviews. Profiles boasting higher ratings are favored, as their products are accorded priority in recommendations to buyers over those of other sellers. In this way, the platform's algorithms help shape reputation. Thus, to cultivate a reputation, sellers must speculate on how these algorithms function, adjust their practices accordingly, and assume the risks associated with their speculations or intuitive “theories” (Siles et al., 2020). Among the most common practices are fulfilling buyers’ demands and taking responsibility for mistakes, even those made by others, which can result in additional economic losses. All of these efforts are aimed at safeguarding one's reputation. A 25-year-old man captures this principle with precision: “Maintaining your status is a top priority, even if you must lose some money by not charging the client in case of a return.”
Amid theories, speculations, and practices aimed at domesticating algorithms (Siles, 2023), a shared truth among sellers emerges: building a reputation on Mercado Libre is a deeply uncertain process. Our interlocutors claimed they had to comply with the platform's algorithmic operations to address this uncertainty, even if they didn’t fully understand them (Arriagada and Siles, 2024). In practice, this meant sellers needed to follow the platform's instructions and include detailed product information. This also involved an additional step: resolving the uncertainty by paying the platform through advertising to be visible at the top of buyers’ searches. A 24-year-old man explained: “You have to train yourself on advertising and marketing because the application keeps showing you new metrics: sales by ads, sales with no ads, sales by product, etc.” These words are revealing in another sense: sellers not only need to purchase advertising (presented in the form of metrics that must be deciphered) but also must take on the risk of training themselves to succeed with the purchased advertising. The results remain uncertain, as explained by a 43-year-old man we interviewed: “We’ve paid for advertisements on Instagram and Facebook. I can’t tell you for sure if I had 100 more sales or 10, but interactions with people did go up. It has helped us.” His explanation suggests that the metrics provided by the platform cannot be directly linked to their investments and the outcomes of their self-training. Taking on the risk depends entirely on whether things are working or not.
Reputation-building also functions as a moral practice. Sellers describe ratings, comments, and visibility not simply as mechanisms of market differentiation but as reflections of personal integrity, discipline, and commitment to “doing things right.” In a context with weak regulatory protections, cultivating a reputation becomes a way of asserting moral worth and of demonstrating that one “deserves” to succeed on the platform.
Echoing Sutherland et al.'s (2019) concept of “gig literacies,” sellers described developing platform-specific competencies to maintain and protect their reputations. Several participants reported refunding buyers immediately—even when the platform did not require it—absorbing losses, or paying extra for faster deliveries to avoid negative evaluations. These practices show how cultivating reputation operates not only as an economic strategy but also as a learned literacy for navigating precarity in platform-mediated commerce.
Another common strategy employed by sellers to increase visibility was to be available on multiple platforms to promote their products, thereby reaching a broader audience. This approach was driven by the conviction that “it's really important to constantly find new selling opportunities [platforms],” as expressed by a 45-year-old woman. A 43-year-old man thus explained his dynamics: We showcase interesting content to increase visibility. We create reels and other types of content that capture attention (…) We try to enhance the brand through reels, and now we want to create podcasts featuring various athletes. This way, we can reach more and more people, so they become familiar with the brand and see our human side.
Actuarial
Finally, sellers dealt with risk as an “actuarial” issue. Neff (2012) points out that those who adopt this strategy tend to focus on carefully studying the risk to plan how to safeguard their job stability. Despite being aware of the market's volatility, these workers feel rooted in their work and believe their skills can help them maintain it over time.
Actuarial strategies are crucial in the context of insecurity, precarity, and informality that characterizes Latin American labor. However, sellers’ use of these strategies is shaped less by the kind of careful “planning” Neff identified among Silicon Alley workers and more by improvisation in contexts of extreme need and uncertainty. Sellers on Mercado Libre engaged in such strategies by reframing risk as a matter of gradual “growth.” To facilitate this growth, sellers are continually compelled to search for new markets in need of their services. Accordingly, workers anticipate future trends by studying emerging demands, a phenomenon notably intensified by the pandemic, during which specific markets declined and new needs emerged. A 40-year-old woman described how she discovered a market that would allow her to keep selling on Mercado Libre over time: That's when I realized that the toys market was always going to be there: birthdays. Especially in schools, they celebrate many birthdays. And yes, sales were good for me during the pandemic. Kids were locked in; parents would cover them in toys so they wouldn’t get bored. [Facebook's] Marketplace worked well for me, but had the problem of control and communication. Control because you can’t control the people behind the screen. There was a trust issue. Communication is another problem because there isn’t much seriousness on that platform. The good thing about Facebook is that you can reach everyone, and increase your visibility a lot (…) The only application that gives you security guarantees is Mercado Libre.
Privatization dynamics naturalize risk to the point that it is perceived as a personal achievement. One of our interviewees (43 years old) expressed feeling “proud” of his sales work on Mercado Libre. In his words: “Sometimes it’ll get you down, but if you look at all the work you’re putting into it, you’re proud and you understand how beneficial it can be.” Thus, even though it was perceived as something imposed in contexts of extreme need, risk management did not necessarily feel like a pessimistic endeavor to all our informants. Some even expressed enthusiasm as they learned how to make money, cultivate their reputation, and continue to “grow” on the platform. Internalizing risk-taking thus feeds into the entrepreneurial discourse of self-improvement.
The resources of venture labor on Mercado Libre
The implementation of these risk privatization strategies relies on the availability and management of resources (Neff, 2012). Investing time and skills into the workplace is a crucial aspect of venture labor, often requiring individuals to do so outside of the official training programs provided by the companies themselves. In the case of Mercado Libre, 3P sellers internalize the responsibility of training themselves and learning the necessary strategies to ensure their business thrives on the platform. To this end, Mercado Libre's sellers utilize various information resources. One of our interviewees, a 43-year-old man, described this experience as a way to overcome the complete unfamiliarity with the platform that characterized the beginning of his relationship with Mercado Libre: “I had no idea how to handle this whole world [e-commerce], but we picked it up by watching tutorials, reading online, and learning from trial and error.”
As these words suggest, one key resource is educational materials, courses, and tutorials that help individuals understand and partially mitigate the risks and vulnerabilities associated with working on platforms that are largely opaque in their operation (Burrell, 2016; Duffy et al., 2024). Sellers educate themselves through information acquired from official sources, such as Mercado Libre's training materials, as well as more informal channels like YouTube, websites, and casual conversations with peers. As previously discussed, dealing with risk also means having the resources and capabilities to work with other platforms (notably Facebook Marketplace) or local sales chains such as Falabella and Paris. Our interviewees saw direct benefits from investing their time and money in such training, as revealed by a 50-year-old woman: “My business started growing along with Mercado Libre, I attended every training session and every course they were offering.”
Despite framing self-learning as an individualistic endeavor, it never occurs in isolation; instead, it flourishes with the support of fellow platform sellers. Consequently, networking emerges as a crucial element in managing risk among Mercado Libre vendors, aligning with Neff's (2012) assertion that it is a fundamental resource of venture labor. Sellers also emphasized the importance of using messaging apps like WhatsApp to connect with other vendors and even clients, facilitating a more “human” exchange than Mercado Libre offers. Most interviewees noted that key business decisions were made after consulting with other vendors. The words of a 55-year-old woman who sells on Mercado Libre highlight the multiple benefits perceived by workers analyzed by Neff in Silicon Alley during the 2000s: “Many friendships have formed. I ask for something, and they explain everything to me. It has been really nurturing for my learning process. Everyone is on your level, no matter how big each one's businesses are.” 3P sellers have thus formed communities of practice to exchange information, seek technical and emotional support, share experiences, learn from mistakes, and identify product “niches” to enhance their visibility and success in the long term.
Similarly, interviewees have built networks with intermediaries to share knowledge about the platform and its algorithms, enhancing their sense of security. These intermediaries, typically distributors for the brands they resell online, often invite them to business events organized by these enterprises. One of our interviewees, a 43-year-old man, explained the dynamic: “We have established many alliances; they invite us to events, and that allows us to be present.” This interviewee also highlighted the direct connection between networking and visibility, suggesting a meaning that extended beyond figuring out how the platform's algorithms work. This suggests that 3P sellers must manage their visibility not only through algorithms but also through networking practices and events, which are crucial for engaging with other key players in the business. Venture workers view these alliances with companies as markers of their entrepreneurial growth and consider them significant milestones in their emerging careers.
In short, third-party sellers behave once again like entrepreneurs. Since work on the platform is closely linked to sellers’ aspirations to become independent entrepreneurs, the need to acquire the skills and knowledge for success in the market is often internalized as an individual obligation. In turn, the evidence of having acquired such knowledge then becomes a sign of self-worth. As one interviewee (a 50-year-old woman) put it: “I grew alongside Mercado Libre; I joined all the training sessions and courses.” Thus, having internalized this obligation increased her sense of worth in the face of constant risk.
For many sellers, establishing routines and adhering closely to platform rules provides a moral sense of order amid volatility. Consistency in posting products, responding to buyers, and fulfilling orders is interpreted as a disciplined and ethically grounded way to secure stability. Rooting oneself in the platform thus produces not only operational continuity but also a moral narrative in which predictability and rule-following offer a sense of legitimacy and control.
Concluding remarks
By analyzing the strategies and resources mobilized by Latin American sellers on Mercado Libre, this paper makes three valuable contributions to studies of platform work. First, it updates the notion of venture labor by highlighting how platforms and algorithms are involved in contemporary processes of risk privatization. Sellers manage uncertainty by investing in training, advertising, and reputation-building while adapting to the opaque, shifting logic of Mercado Libre's algorithms (Burrell, 2016; Siles, 2023). Second, it examines how risk is being redefined by exploring the intersections of platform work and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. For many sellers, the platform became a means to cope with job loss, meet basic needs, and seek autonomy—reframing risk as both necessity and opportunity. Third, it broadens the understanding of venture labor as a culturally situated process by privileging sellers’ experiences in Latin America, particularly those on one of the most popular (yet understudied) platforms in the region. Their practices reveal how venture labor is shaped by local conditions, including labor informality, limited regulation, and the search for legitimacy and safety in a fragmented digital economy.
Our study builds on and extends Neff's (2012) notion of venture labor by examining how third-party sellers on Mercado Libre in Chile navigate risk within a platform economy shaped by distinct institutional, technological, and financial transformations. While Neff (2012) developed the concept of venture labor in the context of Silicon Alley—an emerging tech sector marked by formal labor markets, professional trajectories, and narratives of opportunity—our analysis shows that its components take on different meanings in Chile. Third-party sellers operate in a labor landscape characterized by high informality, limited welfare protections, and the disruptions produced by the 2019 social crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Under these conditions, risk-taking is less a cultural ideal than a pragmatic response to economic vulnerability. Moreover, Mercado Libre plays a dual role: it partially formalizes informal commerce through integrated payment systems, traceability, and standardized procedures, while simultaneously generating new forms of instability tied to algorithmic visibility, reputation scores, and opaque evaluation criteria. Although some sellers mobilize entrepreneurial discourses associated with autonomy or reinvention, these narratives coexist with accounts of survival and constraint. Rather than a replication of Silicon Alley subjectivities, venture labor in Chile emerges as a situated and ambivalent formation—one in which workers internalize risk both to navigate structural precarity and to cope with the platform-specific instabilities that accompany formalization.
These reconfigurations, economic instability, lack of formal employment protections, and growing platformization provide fertile ground for the emergence of venture labor in the Global South. In this setting, risk is not only privatized but deeply normalized and moralized, becoming a core element of sellers’ self-understandings as autonomous and enterprising individuals. This reframing of risk resonates with neoliberal imaginaries of entrepreneurialism. Still, it is also shaped by local constraints, including the absence of robust labor regulation, the prevalence of informal work, and limited institutional safety nets.
Importantly, Mercado Libre is not a neutral arena for venture labor, but rather a specific platform that affords sellers tools, training, visibility, and a sense of safety that is not always available on other marketplaces, such as Facebook Marketplace or Instagram. Sellers highlighted the value of integrated services, such as Mercado Pago, formalized logistics, and algorithmic visibility mechanisms, which enabled them to professionalize their commercial activities. Unlike less-regulated or more opaque platforms, Mercado Libre was consistently perceived as a relatively secure and legitimate space for building a business, developing a reputation, and managing customer relations. This specificity suggests that technical, regulatory, and cultural platform affordances play a critical role in shaping how venture labor is practiced and experienced.
By situating our analysis within a Latin American context, we emphasize the importance of understanding venture labor not as a universal condition of platform work, but as a culturally and geographically situated practice. For the workers we interviewed, venture labor was a response to both structural vulnerability and platform-mediated opportunity. In this way, our findings contribute to a growing body of scholarship that centers the Global South in platform studies and highlights how global dynamics of risk, entrepreneurship, and digital labor are refracted through local histories and infrastructures.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors want to thank Santiago Browne and Diego Olivares for helping us with the data collection.
Ethical approval and informed consent statements
This study received ethical approval from the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez IRB (No. 28/2022) on 5 August 2022.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The first author would like to thank the support of the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo and the Millennium Nucleus on the Evolution of Work (Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico; grant number NCS2024_021). The second author would like to thank the support of the Vicerrectoría de Investigación, Universidad de Costa Rica, project C2903.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
