The problem
A decade ago Turkish shoppers juggled small, slow web stores while local factories and bazaar merchants had no practical way to sell online — let alone export. Cash-on-delivery ruled, logistics were patchy, and going digital meant building your own storefront from scratch.
How it works
Trendyol is a marketplace superapp: sellers list fashion, electronics, home goods and more; Trendyol Express and regional warehouses handle last-mile delivery. Around that core sit Trendyol Go (instant grocery and food delivery by courier), Trendyol Pay (digital wallet), and Dolap (second-hand fashion). Gulf shoppers get Arabic-language apps, curated collections and local warehouses for faster delivery.
Pain points
Unreliable delivery windows, payment friction for the underbanked, and SMEs locked out of e-commerce entirely — plus Turkish manufacturers with goods the Gulf wants but no channel to sell them.
Business model
Commission on every marketplace order (about 85% of regional revenue), delivery fees on Express and Go orders, take-rates on wallet flows, and margins on first-party retail.
Challenges
A dominant domestic share brings antitrust heat; hyper-local Gulf expansion — warehouses, 5,000+ local sellers and counting — burns capital; and management has tied a dual Istanbul-plus-London-or-New York IPO to international sales reaching roughly half of revenue.
Funding
- Raised: $1.5B round co-led by General Atlantic, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Princeville Capital, ADQ and Qatar Investment Authority (TechCrunch, Aug 2021) — months after Alibaba added $350M at a $9.4B valuation.
- Valuation: $16.5B — Turkey’s first decacorn.
Latest — October 2025
Per an October 2025 IndexBox report on Gulf Business’s conversation with president Caglayan Cetin: Trendyol now serves 40M+ customers globally with 250,000+ merchants, counts 3.7M+ customers in the Gulf, and was presenting its hyper-localisation playbook at GITEX Global 2025.