Online spending in Turkey more than doubled last year and is expected to grow significantly again this year, according to a report from the Turkish Ministry of Commerce, mostly due to inflation, but with a significant amount of organic growth as well.
E-commerce spending in Turkey is expected to reach 1.85 trillion Turkish liras in 2023, or 53 billion euros at current exchange rates, split almost evenly between products and services. Although spending growth in liras reached 115%, this does not mean that e-commerce has doubled in importance in a year. This growth is mainly due to rampant inflation, which rose to 75%.
Realistic painting
To get a realistic picture of Turkey’s e-commerce growth, it’s best to look at transaction numbers, which grew 22.3% last year to reach 5.87 billion. By comparison, Forrester calculates that the top five Western European countries will see little to no growth in online spending in 2023.
Transaction volume increased by more than 22%.
Another indicator of above-average online growth in Turkey is the share of online sales in total consumer spending, which has doubled over the past four years, from 10.1% in 2019 to 20.3% last year. The ministry noted that the COVID-19 crisis significantly boosted the adoption of e-commerce in Turkey, but growth has continued even after the pandemic.
Continued growth
The Commerce Department expects spending to grow 84 percent this year with 6.67 billion transactions, 13 percent higher than last year. The forecast is higher than the encouraging growth average for Europe previously predicted by Forrester and GlobalData.
Growth forecasts are stronger than the European average.
In Turkey, 559,412 companies are registered as engaged in e-commerce. The product category with the highest turnover is white goods and household appliances, followed by electronics, and in third place is clothing, footwear and accessories. According to the report, Turks have to wait an average of 46.2 hours for their orders to be delivered.
