Trendyol Gulf CEO Mohamad ElAnsari on Two-Way Commerce and Local Sellers
Trendyol's Gulf chief wants the app in daily routines across the region, and Gulf merchants selling to Istanbul, Bucharest and beyond.
Mohamad ElAnsari measures Trendyol's progress in the Gulf by one number: how often shoppers open the app. In under three years the marketplace has signed 15,500 regional sellers, from large retail groups to small businesses, and built a customer base above four million. Making the app a daily habit, on the level of a trip to the local mall, is the next task.
The base underneath is large. Trendyol was founded in Istanbul in 2010 and runs local-language apps in Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Germany, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Greece, connecting more than 250,000 Turkish sellers and global brands to over 40 million customers. Its own label, Trendyol Collection, sits alongside those third-party merchants.
The merchants are the point. ElAnsari calls the model "two-way commerce": goods flow into the Gulf, and Gulf sellers should be able to ship out. "Just as we import, we have to have the ability to also export," he says. The eventual aim is a seller in Riyadh or Dubai reaching customers in Romania or Istanbul through the same marketplace.
A fast build in the Gulf
Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched first, in late 2023, and the app reached the top of Saudi Arabia's shopping app rankings within days. By November 2023 all six GCC markets were live. Early 2025 brought the four-million customer mark.
His pitch to sellers is that the platform does not compete with them. About 95% of business comes from third-party merchants, he says, with the private label a small slice. "Sellers don't see us as a competitor; they see us as an incremental channel."
Better terms for smaller merchants
In August 2026 Trendyol signed a partnership with Dubai Chambers of Commerce aimed at Dubai-based SMEs. Commission discounts for businesses referred through the chamber were doubled from 20% to 40% and stretched from two months to three, with homepage and campaign placement, advertising credit, priority account management and onboarding support added on top. Trendyol Academy runs training on listings, stock management, pricing, advertising and performance analysis. Saudi sellers received comparable incentives and a dedicated "Local Sellers" page, a shopfront inside the larger storefront.
What we do is bring traffic to the platform, much like a mall attracts footfall. But in a marketplace with millions of products, sellers also need the right tools to stand out.
Scale cuts both ways. One large retailer now moves more products on Trendyol than on its own website, ElAnsari says. Small home-based abaya designers who start at a few thousand riyals a month can reach hundreds of thousands.
Content before anything else
His advice to sellers is unglamorous: fix the content. Images, descriptions, fabric composition. Trendyol's AI shopping assistant, which lets a shopper state an intent such as a AED300 outfit for a casual evening, can only surface products whose listings carry enough detail to be understood.
Local taste shapes the catalogue. Shoppers in the UAE lean toward international brands; shoppers in Saudi Arabia favor local ones, which is why the Saudi mini-store exists inside the wider platform. Ramadan ranges and a limited-edition collaboration with Saudi designer Nasiba Hafiz, sold across the Gulf and in international markets, follow the same reasoning about local relevance.
Nearly three years in, local sellers account for close to two-thirds of Gulf sales, up from a start where everything shipped from Türkiye. Trendyol now operates in 36 countries, ElAnsari says, adapting its assortment market by market and sometimes city by city.
