You get a text from your bank – someone on the other side of the world has just spent $1,500 on your card and it wants to know if it was you. It wasn’t, so you text back and immediately your card is frozen. This is the new Debit Card Alert feature from Frost Bank in the US.

With 2 million users, a deal with Starbucks, and $6 billion worth of transactions, Square is turning smartphones into checkouts, digitising loyalty schemes and reshaping how consumers spend – without using NFC technology.

With over 61% of people reading online reviews before making a purchase decision, it’s even more important than ever to separate the good ones from the bad. But with peer reviews and professional write-ups often having contrasting opinions, who should we trust – and why?

In the first part of a two-part report, Ulysses De La Torre looks at the dominant trends in Latin America's fast-growing e-commerce market, and presents an overview of Brazilian online retail.