How a Turkish E-Commerce Giant Mapped the Czech Market

By the time a company the size of Trendyol announces a new market, the decision has already been made. The interesting work happened earlier, quietly, in the months before anyone read a press release.

The challenge: a big company entering a small, crowded market

Trendyol is not a startup testing the water. Founded in Istanbul in 2010, majority-owned by Alibaba and valued at $16.5 billion in its last funding round, it connects hundreds of thousands of sellers to tens of millions of customers. When its CEO Erdem İnan announced at a summit in Baku, in December 2023, that the company would enter Romania, Greece, Hungary and Czechia in the first quarter of 2024, the scale of the ambition was clear: two million active customers and four million orders across Eastern Europe by year-end.

But Czechia is not a market you enter by turning on a website.

It is small, sophisticated and already contested. Alza dominates. Zalando and About You own the fashion habit. Heureka arbitrates price. Allegro arrived from Poland; Kaufland from Germany. A new marketplace does not walk into an empty room — it walks into a room where everyone knows each other and the furniture is already arranged.

For a company of Trendyol's size, the risk is not failure. The risk is entering on the wrong terms: wrong categories, wrong logistics assumptions, wrong partners, wrong first impression — at a scale where correcting course is expensive and public.

Between 2023 and 2024, YeYe Agency worked on the groundwork.

What we did

Extensive market feasibility and research reports. Not a survey of the market as it appears from Istanbul, but as it functions from Prague: how Czech consumers buy, what they expect on delivery, which categories are saturated and which are quietly underserved, and where a Turkish marketplace's advantages actually translate.

Market entry strategy and competitive analysis. The competitive set was mapped honestly — including the players whose position is stronger than a foreign entrant would assume. Strategy built on flattering assumptions is not strategy; it is a forecast.

Video calls with Czech market and e-commerce experts. Rather than delivering research in a document and stepping back, we put Trendyol's team in direct conversation with people who run e-commerce in this market. Reports describe a market. Practitioners explain it.

Introductions across the ecosystem. This is where a research engagement becomes an entry engagement. We opened doors to:

• the Minister of Trade and the relevant ministry channels
• the Turkish Embassy in Prague
• banks capable of handling the payment and treasury side of a marketplace launch
• warehouses and fulfilment providers
• customs brokers, without whom cross-border e-commerce is theory
• PR agencies who understand how a Turkish brand is received in Czech media

None of those meetings are things a company can schedule from Istanbul with a cold email. They are the product of being here, and of relationships built over years — including through the Czech-Turkish Joint Chamber of Commerce (ČTSOK).

The result

In early 2024, Trendyol went live in Czechia — one of several Central and Eastern European markets it launched that year, alongside Romania, Hungary, Greece, Slovakia, Poland and Bulgaria.

When it did, we wrote:

Trendyol is now in Czechia. Through Trendyol — which has enabled 50,000 different SMEs and tradespeople from Türkiye to export abroad for the first time — Turkish producers have begun offering their best "Made in Türkiye" products to the Czech market. We welcome Trendyol to the Czech Republic and wish them every success.

That sentence contains the part of this story that matters most to us. Trendyol's entry is not one company's expansion. It is a channel through which tens of thousands of Turkish SMEs reach European customers for the first time. The marketplace crosses the border, and a long tail of small producers crosses with it.

Why it matters

Most of what we do is invisible from the outside: the registrations, the filings, the licences. This engagement was different in form but identical in principle.

Research is not a document. It is a decision. The point of feasibility work is not to describe a market. It is to let a company commit — or not — with its eyes open.

Introductions compound. A ministry meeting, an embassy contact, a customs broker who answers the phone: individually small, collectively the difference between arriving and landing.

Size does not exempt you from local knowledge. A $16.5 billion marketplace and a five-person exporter face the same Czech customs procedure, the same Czech consumer expectations, the same crowded shelf. The stakes differ. The homework does not.