Trendyol vs Hepsiburada: Comparing Turkey's Two E-commerce Giants

The short answer

Trendyol and Hepsiburada are the two marketplaces that define Turkish e-commerce, and between 2024 and 2025 they took opposite ownership paths. Trendyol remains Alibaba-controlled—the Turkish-language Wikipedia entry lists Alibaba at 86.5% of shares—while Hepsiburada, founded in 2000 under Doğan Online and the first Turkish company to list on Nasdaq (July 2021), passed into new hands: Kazakhstan's Kaspi.kz completed the acquisition of a controlling interest on January 29, 2025.

What public evidence does not establish matters just as much. Neither platform currently publishes Amazon-style quarterly disclosure in the sources we reviewed (checked August 21, 2026): Trendyol is private and discloses no audited GMV, and Hepsiburada's most recent widely cited full-year figures are for 2023, with its post-acquisition reporting cadence unclear. Comparisons below therefore lean on dated, sourced metrics—and on what structured observation of the two storefronts can measure directly.

At a glance

Two different owners, two different playbooks

• Trendyol under Alibaba: Alibaba invested roughly $1.4 billion across 2018 ($728M) and 2021 ($350M at a $9.4B valuation), per its Wikipedia entry, before an August 2021 round raised $1.5 billion at a $16.5 billion valuation—Turkey's first decacorn—with ADQ, General Atlantic, Qatar Investment Authority, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 participating. The strategic logic reads as Alibaba's bridgehead into Turkish and surrounding markets.
• Hepsiburada under Kaspi.kz: Kaspi, the Kazakh super-app operator, completed its purchase of a controlling stake on January 29, 2025. Founder Hanzade Doğan Boyner built the company out of Doğan Online; the handover to a regional payments-and-commerce group is the single most consequential structural change in Turkish e-commerce of 2025. What Kaspi's integration plan means for marketplace fees, advertising products, and assortment is not yet documented in the sources reviewed—a live question worth tracking empirically.

Scale: what can honestly be compared

One methodological warning for anyone modeling Turkish prices: Hepsiburada's own 2023 reporting shows how treacherous nominal lira series are—104% nominal growth collapses to 31% once inflation-adjusted. Any multi-year price tracking in Turkey needs an explicit deflation approach, or it will manufacture trends that do not exist.

Categories and assortment

Trendyol grew out of fashion and still leads there; its German operation, for instance, is described as clothing-dominated, and it has run AI-designed exclusive collections in the Gulf. General merchandise, groceries, and retail complete the mix. Hepsiburada spans roughly 30 categories—electronics, fashion, home, life, stationery, and office among them—with a historical center of gravity in electronics and home. Practically, that means category-level intelligence work treats them differently: Trendyol observations are richest for trend velocity and fashion pricing; Hepsiburada for durable-goods assortment breadth and price benchmarks.

Delivery networks

• Trendyol Express, founded 2018, runs logistics centers including Ankara and an export operations center at Istanbul Airport (2023), plus warehouses in Saudi Arabia and the UAE supporting the international push.
• HepsiJet covers all 81 Turkish provinces, and sister unit HepsiLojistik offers stocking, packaging, shipping, invoicing, delivery, and returns—i.e., fuller fulfillment services for merchants.

For data purposes, delivery structure shapes what you can observe: a marketplace running its own fleet surfaces delivery-promise fields you can collect and compare across cities, whereas third-party-carrier marketplaces expose less promise information and more variance.

Seller economics and advertising

Both operate classic marketplace mechanics—commissions, fulfillment services, and sponsored placement— but neither breaks out advertising revenue in the sources reviewed, so retail-media share of wallet on either platform has to be inferred from observed sponsored slots rather than disclosures. Two seller-side facts stand out. First, Hepsiburada's 101,500 active merchants (2023) against Trendyol's much larger second-hand seller base on Dolap hints at very different seller-acquisition models. Second, oversight is active: in July 2023 the Turkish Competition Authority fined Trendyol around TRY 61.3 million over, among other things, algorithm manipulation and unfair use of third-party marketplace data. For brands, that is a reminder that platform-held analytics are not neutral instruments; independent observation has real value.

Which platform to track for which intelligence use case

What disciplined collection has to handle

• Currency and inflation: record currency and timestamp on every observation; deflate before comparing across years.
• Localization: both platforms vary listings by city and session; matched windows across fixed locations are the only fair comparison.
• Sponsored versus organic: label sponsorship explicitly rather than assuming rank is organic.
• Structural breaks: the Kaspi deal (January 2025) is a natural experiment boundary—segment Hepsiburada series around it.

Bottom line

Trendyol is the larger, internationally expanding, Alibaba-controlled platform whose opacity makes observation essential; Hepsiburada is the veteran broadline marketplace entering an unresolved integration under Kaspi.kz. Tracking both—carefully separated, inflation-aware, and sponsorship-labeled—gives the cleanest read on Turkish e-commerce. See our Trendyol marketplace page and Hepsiburada marketplace page for the data points we track on each.