The power of Türkiye’s online shopper and the rise of the online merchant

In brief

• According to ETBİS, e-commerce in Türkiye grew 69% in 2021 to reach TRY 381 billion.
• The number of businesses selling on marketplaces grew roughly sevenfold from 2019 to 2021, reaching 472,604.
• The engine of e-commerce is micro-businesses and SMEs, not big brands; brands should build new partnership models with online merchants.

According to the Ministry of Trade’s Electronic Commerce Information System (ETBİS), e-commerce in Türkiye reached TRY 381 billion in 2021. That’s a 69% increase on 2020. E-commerce’s share of total trade was 17.7%. As of 2021, the number of companies selling online in Türkiye reached around 485,000; 26,442 of them sell through their own websites and 472,604 through marketplaces. In other words, online marketplaces remain the engine of e-commerce. The sector is expected to exceed TRY 560 billion in 2022.

We’re all familiar with these figures. The one certainty is this: in the coming years, e-commerce will take a bigger share of total trade. The transformation we see in every area is naturally happening in commerce too. The question really on people’s minds is which players and brands will capture more of this growth. The answer may look easy, but it’s actually a little more complicated. The first, and largely correct, answer is that e-commerce platforms that grew fast during the pandemic and brands that successfully completed their digital transformation will take a larger share. But to adapt to the e-commerce ecosystem, brands need to make sense of two things.

1. Becoming part of the online shopper’s decision process

This starts with brands understanding rapidly changing consumer purchase behaviour, because completing a digital transformation alone won’t be enough to succeed in online retail. People today have countless options online: search engines, social media, price comparison sites, review sites and much more. So many choices and so much information are steadily turning the path to purchase into a network of touchpoints and decisions. It’s fair to say the way people make purchase decisions has become highly complex.

As people in Türkiye turn heavily to online shopping, being in the right place at the right time becomes crucial for brands. Standing out in this complex world of purchase journeys isn’t easy, but brands that want to successfully guide customers to the “Buy” button will need to make sense of that journey.

2. Harnessing the power of the online merchant

The second point, or rather the unseen part of the picture, is this: the small traders, micro-businesses and SMEs that account for most of Türkiye’s commerce adapted to the online shopping ecosystem faster than brands did. Most importantly, brands with influence in commerce need forward-looking plans to create new commercial models and partnerships with this segment in e-commerce. Just as wholesalers in Istanbul’s Rami district, SMEs and dealers mattered to brands in traditional trade, online merchants will matter just as much to brands’ growth in transformed commerce. In an environment where distribution networks are increasingly monopolised, brands will need these different kinds of partnerships and models.

Another Ministry of Trade figure: the number of businesses selling on marketplaces reached 472,604 in 2021, up from around 68,000 in 2019 and 256,861 in 2020. That’s almost a sevenfold increase in three years. Another important figure is that 74% of e-commerce businesses sell on one marketplace, 12% on two, 6% on three and 3% on four. A further striking figure comes from Euromonitor’s 2021 retail report: online merchants, defined as “3rd party merchants”, rank first with a 10% share of total retail.

Based on these three data points, it’s fair to say that most of Türkiye’s e-commerce is carried out by micro-businesses and SMEs. The data also shows that the engine of e-commerce is not big brands and corporations. So we can comfortably say that e-commerce platforms, too, draw their sales, distribution and product strength from marketplaces, that is, from online merchants.