The answer is all of them. M-Commerce, cross-border online shopping and social media all play major roles in the growing E-Commerce market of Turkey. The country remains the second largest B2C E-Commerce market in Eastern Europe, and with one of the top five Internet audiences in the Old Continent Turkey shows huge potential for further growth.
M-Commerce has been a major driver for E-Commerce growth in Turkey in the past few years. With rising mobile Internet subscription, and reliance on smartphones for Internet access, it is expected to further increase in importance. In line with this, major E-Commerce players in Turkey, including mass merchant Hepsiburada.com, E-Bay-owned auctioning website Gittigidiyor.com, and fast-growing marketplace n11.com all indicate that around 50% of their traffic is generated on mobile devices already.
Social media also occupied a significant place in Turkey’s E-Commerce market in 2015, with social media users conducting research of virtually all product categories on social media prior to purchase, leading among which are clothing, shoes and books. Links to social media also lead browsing shoppers towards international websites and serve as a bridge to cross-border E-Commerce.
Compared to other European countries, Turkey’s cross-border online shopper penetration rate remains relatively low; this trend can be expected to also gather pace in the future. Cross-border online payments with domestic bank cards have already significantly increased in the last two years, and cross-border E-Commerce transactions increase not only in number, but also in value. In early 2016, the major international players including USA-based Amazon, and China-based Alibaba and AliExpress already attracted significant attention from online shoppers in Turkey, ranking high in terms of number of visitors in the country.
With continuous increase in Internet and online shopper penetration, all of these trends are likely to develop side by side, while total B2C E-Commerce sales in Turkey maintain their advancement.
Further insights into the development of online retail in Turkey can be found in our report “Turkey B2C E-Commerce Market 2016”.
