Why Worldline Says Turkey Is Ready for eCommerce Innovation

The fast-growing Turkish eCommerce market is catching the attention of global online businesses.

According to Guillaume Tournand, vice president of growth and digital commerce at Worldline, Turkey is one of the “high-growth markets” globally where eCommerce growth potential is significantly larger than growth rates in the European Union or the United States. And as a result, a growing number of international eCommerce businesses are looking to do cross-border eCommerce in the market.

“The tremendous growth that we’ve seen in markets like Turkey is significantly higher than what we can see in Europe or the U.S.,” Tournand told PYMNTS in an interview.

He pointed to government data from the BKM, the Interbank Card Center in Turkey, which showed that local eCommerce has been growing annually at a compound annual growth rate of about 40% in recent years. This rate accelerated to a staggering 75% as the pandemic shifted more retailers online.

These signs of “a strong economy moving quickly towards the eCommerce world” made Turkey an obvious choice for Worldline when deciding on which high-growth market to crack next, he said.

To do this, the global payments company announced in January a partnership with Turkish FinTech company Lidio to offer eCommerce merchants a one-stop-shop approach for local collecting in Turkey, complete with access to major payment methods, including Troy, the only domestic card scheme in the country.

“The benefit is to provide this service at scale so that they can access the market immediately without needing to work with another local [payment service provider (PSP)],” Tournand explained.

He added that the solution eliminates the high costs and complexity of managing multiple contracts and integrations. It also gives international online merchants a single remittance flow and protection from excessive foreign exchange (FX) risks given the access they have to same-day exchange in their currency of choice.

Beyond that, Tournand said the companies’ goal is to ensure that compliance with local regulations and legislation is as quick and seamless as possible for international eCommerce merchants to manage.

“We want to provide them with the best of both worlds, to not only have a single connection to a global PSP, but also benefiting in full from that local touch and hedging them against many of the complexities, FX being one of them,” he said.

Read more: Value of Local Expertise Underestimated in Expanding Cross-Border Commerce

KPI-Oriented eCommerce Merchants

According to Tournand, today’s “eCommerce-first merchants” are one of the major growth drivers behind the booming trend.

Describing them as “KPI-oriented and conversion-rate basis points-obsessed,” he said retailers have become technically conversant, able to measure the conversion rate that will drive people to their websites and determine the right selection of products to convert store browsers into shoppers, all while ensuring the customer journey runs smoothly with as little friction as possible.

He also highlighted the value of offering the right mix of local payment options as consumer habits evolve, a trend he said global online merchants would need to follow closely to better serve their customers in each market.

Asked about his growth predictions for the global eCommerce market, Tournand said that a decade from now, merchants will still be looking to make payments as easy as possible for their customers while looking for the most optimized path to convert their website visitors to shoppers who made a purchase.

And they’ll be looking for experts to achieve this, he added, a role which Worldline will strive to be equipped to play as it leverages the payment borders between its merchants and their consumers, investing in its knowledge and expertise in the payment sector to meet merchants’ and consumers’ growing needs.

“I’ve yet to meet someone in the payment ecosystem who believes payments are simple,” and for that reason, “I don’t want our merchants to become payment experts,” Tournand said. “That’s where we bring value to the table.”

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