Turkish e-commerce is marketplace-first: Trendyol and Hepsiburada are where product discovery happens, the way Amazon dominates in the US or Germany. A foreign brand that launches only a D2C store in Turkey is invisible to most buyers.
What you need to sell
A Turkish legal entity (or an authorized local distributor/partner), tax registration, Turkish-language product content and local return logistics. Both platforms run onboarding checks; incomplete localization is the most common rejection reason.
Winning the buy box
Rankings inside the marketplaces respond to price competitiveness, shipping speed, stock reliability, review scores and content quality. Turkish product titles follow different search patterns than translated ones — native keyword work matters inside marketplaces just as much as on Google.
Marketplace + D2C, not versus
The pattern that works: marketplaces for discovery and volume, a localized D2C store for margin, retention and campaigns. Product feeds should sync from one catalog source so prices and stock never diverge.
Common mistakes
Machine-translated listings, ignoring installment payment expectations, treating Turkish reviews as an afterthought, and pricing without accounting for commission plus shipping subsidies. Each is fixable — before launch, cheaply; after a suspension, expensively.