Introduction – Trendyol
Trendyol is a leading eCommerce fashion marketplace in Turkey, headquartered in Istanbul and was founded by a Turkish entrepreneur Demet Suzan Mutlu in the year 2010. It is the largest fashion e-retailer in the country selling 20 million fashion items a year which has increased the company’s Annual Run-Rate by approximately $350 million.
Trendyol offers thousands of discounted products in different categories like clothes, cosmetics, mobile phones, computers, and so on which made this company Turkey’s largest flash sales eCommerce marketplace.
In addition, over the last 12 years, Trendyol has seen tremendous growth from a single shopping site to an eCommerce marketplace model valued at US$16.5 billion. Trendyol still has plenty of room to grow with the increase in the growth of eCommerce in Turkey (growing at 22% over the last five years), which currently accounts for only 2% of all retail sales.
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Reason Behind Its Success
Turkey’s strong textile industry has played a very important role in Trendyol’s success. It is considered a major player in the textile industry with a global export value of $15 billion.
Its massive success has made it the only major eCommerce platform to become the country’s first tech unicorn and the first Decacorn after raising US$1.5 billion last year.
Considering the fact that, this firm became profitable only five years after it was founded. And, at present, it is in service with over 30 million shoppers and delivers more than 1 million packages per day, Trendoyl success has been phenomenal. In fact, when it comes to fashion, this eCommerce platform has made a benchmark because of its 25-30% market share and 222.4 million monthly visitors in its home country. Apart from offering just fashion products, it also offers plenty of products in different categories like electronics, beauty, and even groceries.
Furthermore, it also supports the digitization of more than 200,000 independent traders and SMEs, helping them reach more customers and grow their businesses.
Funding Attracted by Trendyol
According to Tech Funding News, Trendyol has raised $1.5 billion in a large-scale funding round that values the company at $16.5 billion from global institutional investors, including General Atlantic, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, as well as Princeville Capital and Sovereign Wealth Fund, ADQ. United Arab Emirates) and the Qatar Investment Authority. Among all the investors, Japanese tech investor SoftBank marked its first investment in the country, through Trendyol.
According to a report by Webrazzi, the largest shareholder in Trendyol is the Chinese eCommerce company Alibaba. It acquired an undisclosed amount of majority stake in the company at a valuation of $728 million in April 2018. Alibaba increased its ownership of the Turkish company to 86.5 percent in 2021 by investing an additional $350 million. The most recent Alibaba investment valued the company at $11 billion, and Reuters confirmed this information. Therefore, the value of Trendyol has surged by more than 20 times over the past four years.
Demet Suzan Mutlu, the company’s founder, stated: “We started Trendyol to have a beneficial influence in the nations we serve. The money raised will help Trendyol expand both domestically and globally. To speed up the digitization of Turkish SMEs, Trendyol will continue to invest in national infrastructure, technology, and logistics. We are delighted to collaborate with such powerful investors who support our mission.”
Business Mechanism of Trendyol
The initial step while building a marketplace like Trendyol would be to understand what is the whole process of operating it, how it generates revenue, and what are the key growth drivers. Read ahead to gain insights into how a marketplace business like Trendyol can be set up.
1. The Business Model of Trendyol
The business model of an eCommerce marketplace works on the concept of inviting multiple sellers to sell to an established customer base through a single platform. Buyers get to choose from a wide range of products. The entire process is managed by the admin of the platform.
Likewise, Trendyol has adopted this concept and gained huge success by positioning itself as a leading fashion marketplace in Turkey and continues to grow and create value through five main divisions: Trendyol Express, Trendyol Go, Dolap, TrendyolPay, and Trendyol Tech.
- Trendyol Express is basically a last-mile delivery solution, offering a high-quality delivery experience to customers.
- Instant grocery, and food delivery service through its own carrier named TrendyolGo which brings the daily needs of the customers to their doorstep within minutes.
- Dolap, one of the largest platforms for pre-owned products in Turkey where users can sell and buy second-hand items.
- Its own digital wallet named Trendyol Pay offers fast and safe payment options to its customers.
- Among all of these, it also has one of the top research and development centers named Trendyol Tech.
The company has served more than 12 million customers across the country of which 70% are women in Turkey who shopped online on Trendyol. Furthermore, with high purchase re-engagement, 90% of its traffic is generated organically and 70% of all sales come from the other major metropolitan cities where customers have fewer brands and styles to choose from.
Here is a SWOT analysis of Trendyol that highlights all the key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to get a better understanding of how Trendyol meets customers’ expectations and captures their interest.
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2. Revenue Channels of Trendyol
Trendyol generates revenue with 60% of its sales coming from mobile devices, push notifications, SMS, social media ads and emails. Here are some other ways from where Trendyol generates revenue.
Commission
Trendyol charges a commission on every sale to generate reasonable revenue. The commission rate varies according to the categories of the products. According to Uptopico, the current commission rates of Trendyol are as follows:
– Accessories: 5% – 25%
– Cosmetics and personal care: 5% – 17%
– Electronics: 6% – 25%
– Sporting Goods: 8% – 10%
– Children’s Products: 8% – 18%
– Supermarket: 12% – 15%
– Clothing: 17% – 20%
Membership
Trendyol offers the best shopping experience for customers by giving a membership program named Trendyol Elite which is totally free. After becoming a member of Trendyol Elite customers get access to additional discount coupons and exclusive offers on products.
There are some conditions that users must fulfill for becoming a member of Trendyol Elite. To become an Elite user on Trendyol, customers have to order 30 products with a total minimum amount of 3000 TL ($160 US) within 3 months.
Need a complete overview of how an eCommerce marketplace works?
Essential Features of Trendyol Marketplace
Make sure to have these features while building a marketplace like Trendyol.
1. Order Management
Trendyol has this feature which not only enables additional sales but also organizes data. This enables the admin to manage variables like the total number of orders, delivery date, the turnaround time for product delivery, the average number of orders, order by location, and much more. The order status is changed in the background when a customer completes a transaction.
2. Exciting Special Offers
Trendyol always offers exciting discounts on several products via flash sales banners. Basically, it’s an image announcing sales for a limited time period and can be seen mostly at the top of the page to gain visitors’ attention.
3. Push Notifications
Push notifications are a great marketing strategy to drive customer engagement by sending direct messages on their apps or mobile devices. Trendyol’s push notification feature informs customers, whenever there is a price drop on a product and inspires them to take a specific call to action which helps them to buy the products of their choice at a very reasonable price.
4. Multiple Payment Methods
Apart from popular payment methods like cash on delivery, Klarna (pay now, buy now pay later, pay in installments, debit card), PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, this marketplace also has a wallet feature where users can instantly add money to their wallet and pay using Trendyol wallet. Also, users get 1% money back on every order that they can spend on their next purchase.
5. Inventory Management
This feature of Trendyol allows sellers to be capable of efficiently managing their inventory and orders. With this, sellers can closely monitor the stock of their products and regularly track the inventory status.
6. Easy Return and Refund Management
With this feature a customer can return a product within 30 days of receiving the order. A vendor can check the status of return payments requested by customers through the return section. In addition, to facilitate admin and keep a record of the easy return request, a vendor gets a section that displays user details, product, quantity, request type, amount to be returned, and date of the request.
7. Scalability
Trendyol has a variety of clothing brands from luxury clothing, and everyday wear to sportswear. It has numerous brands like Puma, Skechers, Mango, Lacoste, Mothercare, Zara, Levi’s, H&M, Louis Vuitton, and many more. This feature boosts its capacity to deal with a large volume of customers on the website. Moreover, the presence of multiple products on the eCommerce website helps in increasing brand awareness.
Different Ways To Create a Marketplace like Trendyol
There are many reliable ways to create an eCommerce marketplace. Here we are listing two popular approaches for creating a website like Trendyol. Depending upon your requirements, you can choose one that suits you the best.
1. Develop from Scratch
For creating a marketplace like Trendyol one can hire skilled developers. With this approach, the eCommerce marketplace can be built from scratch. But since it requires excellent designing and development skills this approach can take hundreds of thousands of developing hours. In this process, either an in-house team can be hired or the complete development can be outsourced to custom eCommerce development firms.
2. Use Turnkey Solutions
While building a marketplace from scratch seems like a good choice, but only sometimes. Since a lot of time and resources are invested in it, it is essential to invest resources and effort smartly. Entrepreneurs can take advantage of a complete turnkey solution with all the essential features which is faster, easier, and less expensive without having to code.
Build a scalable multi-vendor eCommerce marketplace with our standalone solution
To Sum Up
A valuation of $16.5 billion makes Trendyol the first tech startup to receive the title “Decacorn” in Turkey. Its success opens up doors for other eCommerce startups in the region.
To take advantage of the growing market segment, entrepreneurs can start their own marketplace like Trendoyl with a readymade marketplace solution like Yo!Kart.
The versatile eCommerce marketplace software provides the ideal platform for an eCommerce marketplace like Trendyol. It is one of the best multi-vendor eCommerce software used by more than 5000 businesses worldwide. It has all the essential in-built features and multiple third-party integrations.
Apart from the aforementioned points, multiple other key points make Yo!Kart favorable for building a marketplace like Trendyol. Some of these are:
- Product Catalog System
- Single-page workflows and logic-driven UI
- Order Inventory Management
- Customizable Shipping Management
- Progressive Web Apps (PWA) Compliance
- Supports global operations with robust Scalable Engine, Multilingual and Multi-currency
- Abandoned Cart Management
- Result-oriented marketing features like Affiliate modules, Discount coupons, and more.
- Lifetime license and source code ownership
- Up to 1-year free technical support
Recently, the latest update of Yo!Kart ― V10 has also been released. It offers streamlined eCommerce workflows, a completely refreshed UI, multiple new features, and additional integrations.
