Last Updated: 11th January, 2024
Back in 2009, when Demet Suzan Mutlu dropped out of Harvard Business School, to start her very own business, she had set the ball rolling for what would be Turkey’s first Decacorn. Bootstrapping for the initial push, she set out to change the country’s fashion industry, with a dynamic fashion eCommerce marketplace – Trendyol.
Leveraging a mix of inclusive business practices, robust technologies, and personalized experiences; while capitalizing on the eCommerce renaissance in Turkey, the business has scaled rapidly.. With the sale portfolio boasting 20 million fashion items a year, it has an increasing Annual Run-Rate of approximately $350 million.
The now Alibaba-backed Trendyol still has plenty of room to grow – with 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, times are opportune for this fashion marketplace. In this blog, read how you can build an eCommerce marketplace like Trendyol.
Table Of Contents
Trendyol – From dining-room idea to Turkey’s first decacorn
Coming from Peter Drucker, “founder of modern management”, this quote means business. (Excuse the pun!)
When Mutlu left behind a Harvard degree, and poured in funds for bootstrapping her startup she saw an opportunity – a demand in the market for an online fashion, and supportive ingredients for such a business. These are drivers that have propelled the business forward. Let’s see what these are:
- 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.
- 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.
- Over the last 12 years, Trendyol has scaled from a single shopping site to an eCommerce marketplace model to now a super app valued at US$16.5 billion.
- After scaling as a fashion marketplace, it has added other products in its offering. So apart from offering just fashion products, it also offers plenty of products in different categories like electronics, beauty, and even groceries.
- As a business catalyzing symbiotic business relationships, it also supports the digitization of more than 200,000 independent traders and SMEs, helping them reach more customers and grow their businesses.
Considering the fact that, this firm became profitable only five years after it was founded, Trendyol’s success has been phenomenal. At present, it is in service with over 30 million shoppers and delivers more than 1 million packages per day, and 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. 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.
Know How Trendyol Operates
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
Trendyol operates on a B2B2C marketplace business model – 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.
Moreover, Tredyol continues to grow and create value through five main divisions: Trendyol Express, Trendyol Go, Dolap, TrendyolPay, and Trendyol Tech.
- Trendyol Express: A last-mile delivery solution, offering a high-quality delivery experience to customers.
- TrendyolGo: Instant grocery, and food delivery service through Trendyol’s carrier TrendyolGo bringing 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.
- Trendyol Pay: A digital wallet offering fast and safe payment option.
- Trendyol Tech: A research and development center.
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.
| Strengths | Weaknesses |
|
|
| Opportunities | Threats |
|
|
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.
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 fulfil to become a member of Trendyol Elite i.e. ordering 30 products with a minimum of 3000 TL ($160 US) within 3 months. So, while this membership itself doesn’t directly bring in revenue, it rewards consumers for higher purchases.
Know how an eCommerce marketplace works
Pivotal Features of Trendyol
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.
Get Started 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
To Sum Up
Demet Mutlu seized the eCommerce opportunity in Turkey, with the right business and at the right time and set the ball rolling for eCommerce adoption in the country.
Entrepreneurs, considering to build a marketplace like Trendyol, can now take advantage of the growing eCommerce market in the country. And just like Trendyol, leverage purpose-built technology solutions and adept business practices to script their own success story.
To do that, they can take inspiration from Trendyol’s operations, discussed here. For building a purpose-built technology solution, choosing turnkey solutions like YoKart will help in establishing a strong competitive advantage. The versatile solution 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 offers multiple third-party integrations.
Moreover, YoKart also comes with eCommerce mobile apps for Android and iOS ecosystems. These apps offer signature YoKart experience to users, and essential features like push notifications, voice search, easy login and more.
