Growth insight from the Turkey e-commerce giant
For Turkey’s 80 million inhabitants, Trendyol is the e-commerce platform of the nation. As the number 1 most downloaded e-commerce app in the region, Trendyol clocked a growth rate of over 100% for the last three years.
Trendyol is Turkey’s largest and fastest-growing e-commerce shopper base, with 12 million active shoppers and 25 million members on the platform. They recently joined Alibaba group after they became a substantial shareholder of the startup. The team at Trendyol has managed to rapidly expand the brand thanks to Alibaba’s investment and their innovative tactics for leveraging mobile.
As strategic partners of Headway, two of Trendyol’s digital marketing specialists, Sevinç Uçar and Berkay Songur, were invited to take part in a Masterminds Session in Barcelona. They explained Trendyol’s current mobile app user acquisition strategies and gave insight into the company’s most successful growth activities. Read the following short recap of their presentation for a better understanding of how they’ve maintained accelerated growth despite challenges in Turkey and the e-commerce industry as a whole.
Trendyol’s growth despite current challenges
Founded in 2010 as a fashion shopping site, the success of the brand enabled the company to evolve into a marketplace with a variety of products on offer, like consumer electronics, white goods, cosmetics, supermarket items, and home furnishing & accessories. They came on the scene while the e-commerce market was relatively new and were able to rapidly expand as Turkey’s internet usage and e-commerce adoption increased. Mobile shoppers have become the focus of their business strategy and currently, their mobile web and in-app purchases account for more than 85% of Trendyol’s total sales. Trendyol sells over 200 million items a year.
Despite being a growing market, Turkey has recently faced high taxation rates for businesses, as well as unfavorable exchange rates, and logistical constraints associated with shipping and parcel delivery. In addition, the e-commerce app market as a whole has been facing difficulties associated with a highly competitive vertical, fraud, and challenges related to attribution, measurement and results tracking. For the mobile acquisition team at Trendyol, continued growth meant finding ways to effectively attract new users and engage existing members to overcome the challenges they were facing locally and industry-wide.
Generating engagement and measuring impact
To ramp up Trendyol’s growth the marketing team focused on establishing paid and organic install channels as well as developing sales events and a repeatable and scalable advertising strategy.
For their UA strategies, they wanted a diverse variety of channels to ensure they took advantage of every available source. To manage their extensive number of channels and correctly allocate the budget according to the value of the users gained through each channel, they developed a universal KPI called the Marketing Value (VBR), that would allow them to measure the value of each channel. They were able to accomplish this by calculating the LTV of their users. With the VBR metric, the team is able to compare results from all channels and accurately allocate channel budgets for maximum ROI.
To develop a scalable sales event strategy, the team focused on measurement and precision. By carefully tracking the uplift generated from events and strategically scheduling event promotion windows, they were able to accurately allocate promotional budgets for each event, to optimally take advantage of sale event conversion rates.
The event strategy has proven to be extremely successful at boosting engagement and install rates at predictable intervals throughout the year. The result: their sales events generate on average a 7x increase in installs and a 6x increase in overall sales.
Overcoming logistical constraints
As the startup has successfully grown over the last few years, one of the biggest roadblocks they faced was that their growth outpaced how quickly the established delivery companies in Turkey could adequately support their logistical needs. In order to continue to grow to meet demand, the Trendyol team decided to make the big investment of creating their own logistics company, Trendyol Express. After just one year of operations, the company does a significant portion of the businesses’ shipping and deliveries.
Looking long-term and down the product lifecycle
Trendyol’s final major growth efforts have been focused on expanding the app’s services and providing solutions that take into consideration the entire product lifecycle. After successfully increasing the categories of products offered through the platform (e.g. Home, electronics, groceries), their next aim is to increase their offering to include other types of services, like ticket booking.Dolap
The other progressive investment made last year was the acquisition of the second-hand fashion marketplace app, Dolap. They hope to increase the presence of the second-hand marketplace within Trendyol and establish a responsible culture that will extend the life of all the products sold on the e-commerce platform.
Trendyol’s future plans for continued growth mean they must continue to develop their UI/UX to be less directed to fashion and more able to promote all sorts of offerings. Being that their best selling item last Black Friday was laundry detergent, they seem to already be seeing the fruits of their efforts to diversify their marketplace offerings.
After the insightful Mobile Mastermind session, we will be excited to see what is next for Trendyol and hope to hear more updates and insight from Sevinç Uçar and Berkay Songur