Trendyol vs eBay — Two Marketplaces That Want Completely Different Sellers

On this page

• The short answer
• Who is even allowed to sell
• New versus used, and why it settles the question
• Scale, and what can honestly be compared
• Fees, side by side
• Getting paid
• Listing mechanics
• Returns and who pays
• Platform risk on each side
• Which one is for you
• Running both with FLUF Connect
• Sources and verification
• Related guides

The short answer

If you are a reseller — someone sourcing used, vintage or pre-owned stock — this comparison ends quickly. eBay is built for you and Trendyol will not take you. Not because your goods are prohibited but because Trendyol’s quality standard requires items to be unused, its onboarding requires a registered business with tax-invoicing capability, and its product schema has no way to declare an item’s condition. There is nowhere to put the information.

If you are a registered business selling new stock, the comparison becomes real, and it turns on geography. eBay gives you 134 million active buyers spread across the world with a low barrier to entry. Trendyol gives you the leading position in a single large market growing at more than 50% a year, plus an expanding footprint across the Gulf and central and eastern Europe — at roughly 1.6 times eBay’s headline commission rate in fashion, on a VAT-inclusive base, with money arriving over a month after delivery.

The rest of this page is the detail behind those two paragraphs, and one recurring theme: on almost every axis, the two platforms differ by design rather than by degree.

Who is even allowed to sell

This is the sharpest difference and the one most comparison articles skip.

On eBay, registration is effectively open. Private individuals list alongside businesses, and in the UK a private seller now pays no final value fee at all with 300 free listings a month. There is no entity requirement, no tax-registration gate and no approval queue for the account itself.

Trendyol runs three separate onboarding tracks, and none of them admits an individual.

The Gulf programme is unusually well documented, and Trendyol’s own policy is worth reading if it applies to you: non-local sellers must have no commercial activity or inventory inside Saudi Arabia, ship from offshore with goods imported as personal imports in the customer’s name, and carry the VAT, customs, compliance, invoicing and after-sales liability themselves. Several categories are closed to them entirely, including cosmetics and personal care, and Trendyol says misclassifying a product to evade that gating means immediate and permanent suspension.

The practical summary for a European seller: you cannot open a Trendyol Turkey store without incorporating in Turkey or appointing a Turkish tax representative. You can apply to Trendyol International with an EU VAT number. Both are application-based rather than self-serve. On eBay you would already be listing.

New versus used, and why it settles the question

Trendyol’s Seller Violation Policy sets a product quality standard in one line: products must meet all features presented, be undamaged and unused, and comply with safety regulations.

Three independent things corroborate that this is a real rule rather than boilerplate.

First, enforcement. Trendyol’s violation-points system assigns 48 points — immediate account closure — for the sale of non-original products or products with strong suspicion of originality. Twelve points is a two-day suspension, twenty-four is five days, thirty-six is seven.

Second, the data model. The create-product schema in Trendyol’s Marketplace API lists its required fields as barcode, title, productMainId, brandId, categoryId, quantity, stockCode, dimensionalWeight, description, listPrice, salePrice, images, vatRate and attributes. There is no condition field, required or optional. A seller has no mechanism to declare an item used. Compare eBay, which publishes a full condition taxonomy running from new with tags through pre-owned grades to for-parts-or-not-working.

Trendyol Group also owns Dolap, a separate marketplace for second-hand items. Sellers of used stock should review Dolap’s eligibility and fees.

One genuine exception exists, and it is a category rather than a condition: Trendyol’s published commission table prices refurbished mobile phones at 9%, against 7% for new ones. So certified refurbished electronics do trade there. We could not reach a primary source setting out the certification requirements for becoming a refurbished seller under Turkey’s regulated scheme, so we are not going to describe them.

A note on a common error: English Wikipedia describes Trendyol as a marketplace for new and second-hand goods. That conflates Trendyol with Dolap and contradicts Trendyol’s own seller policy.

Scale, and what can honestly be compared

eBay publishes audited figures. For the 2024 financial year it reported 134 million active buyers and $74.7 billion of gross merchandise volume.

Trendyol does not, and this is worth stating plainly because a great many articles quote figures that have no source. Trendyol is private and Alibaba consolidates it into a segment without breaking out its numbers. What exists is: Alibaba’s statement in its most recent annual filing that Trendyol is by far the leading e-commerce platform in Türkiye in terms of 2025 gross merchandise value — a ranking, not a number; Trendyol’s own corporate figures of more than 40 million customers, 250,000-plus sellers and delivery to 35 countries; and its international seller centre’s separate count of 169,608 sellers and 27 million active shoppers. Trendyol does not explain why the two seller counts differ.

For third-party evidence of its position, the usable sources are Gemius’s 2025 panel, which put Trendyol first in Turkey on reach with 42 million users against Hepsiburada’s 29 million, and Similarweb’s July 2026 traffic, where trendyol.com’s 106.4 million monthly visits ran about 1.7 times Hepsiburada’s and 3.2 times Amazon Turkey’s. The market itself is the strongest number available: Turkey’s Ministry of Trade put total e-commerce at 4.57 trillion lira in 2025, up 52.2%.

The only hard comparator inside Turkey is Hepsiburada, which is listed and therefore reports: 257.5 billion lira of gross merchandise value in 2025, 11.8 million active customers and 87.5 million orders. Be careful building a series from it, because its 2024 figures were restated substantially between releases.

What you should not do is build a merchandise-volume table pitting Trendyol against eBay. Half of it would be invented. The honest framing is that eBay is broad and global; Trendyol is deep in one large market that is growing very fast.

Fees, side by side

Three things about that table deserve emphasis.

The commission is charged on the VAT-inclusive price. Trendyol states it three times in its own documentation and every column of its published rate card is headed accordingly. That makes the effective gap against eBay wider than the headline percentages suggest, because eBay’s percentage is applied to a base that excludes VAT in most jurisdictions.

The spread across categories is enormous — from 0% on some digital cards to 30% on phone cases, with a 7% rate on the phones those cases go on. If you sell electronics, Trendyol undercuts eBay substantially. If you sell fashion, it costs roughly 1.6 times as much. There is no single answer to “which is cheaper”; there is only an answer per category.

There are modifiers, and some are large. Trendyol operates seller levels that reduce the rate, a two-month new-seller discount for anyone uploading a first product within fifteen days of applying, and a notably lower schedule for women-led businesses and co-operatives — apparel at 4.3% against the standard 21.5%.

One more structural difference belongs here. eBay’s competitive mechanic on a crowded listing is search ranking and, for auctions, bidding. Trendyol’s is the buybox — several sellers can list against the same product card and one of them wins the buy button. That makes price matching a constant pressure in a way it is not on eBay, where your listing is your own. It is also the practice that drew regulatory attention, as the commitments described below make clear.

Getting paid

This is where the two platforms are furthest apart, and it is the difference most likely to affect how you actually run a business.

Trendyol starts the clock at delivery, not at sale, then adds a per-category maturity period of 7, 14, 21 or 28 business days. Fashion, shoes and bags, home and cosmetics are all on 28. That is roughly five and a half calendar weeks after the parcel arrives before the money matures, and payouts then run twice weekly on Mondays and Thursdays. Phones and laptops sit on 14 days, books on 21.

eBay pays business sellers within about a day of confirming the buyer’s payment, on a schedule you choose. UK private sellers are paid two calendar days after delivery confirmation on tracked postage.

Trendyol does offer an early-payment facility that pays out on the nearest Tuesday or Friday, but it is a discounted advance: the panel shows a deduction amount before you confirm, and the rate is not published anywhere we could find. Treat it as financing rather than as faster payment.

For a business moving stock at volume, a 28-business-day cycle on your largest category is a working-capital decision, not an administrative detail.

Listing mechanics

Both platforms are more prescriptive than a general store, but in different ways.

Each Trendyol variant needs its own barcode and stock code, and the brand must be recognised on Trendyol. Review these details before publishing.

Its limits are: 100 characters of title, 30,000 characters of description with HTML allowed, a maximum of eight images per barcode at 1200 by 1800 pixels over HTTPS, a VAT rate drawn from a fixed set, and a list price that cannot fall below the sale price. Categories must be leaves — a category with children is rejected — and Trendyol advises re-pulling the tree weekly.

eBay allows 80 characters of title, up to 24 photographs, and up to 250 variations in a single listing with five variation details of up to 50 values each. Its distinctive requirement is item specifics, which are not decorative: eBay states that your item will only appear in filtered search results if you have added the matching item specific.

Two Trendyol behaviours have no eBay equivalent and matter for anyone integrating. Creating a product only queues it for approval — an unapproved or rejected product never goes live. And once a product has been accepted, colour, size, brand and barcode can no longer be changed; correcting one means deleting and recreating the product.

Trendyol’s variant model is also worth understanding before you map a catalogue. Variants are grouped by a shared model code and must differ only in attributes. Attributes flagged as slicers, usually colour, split into separate product cards; attributes flagged as varianters, usually size, stay on one card as selectable options — and there is exactly one varianter per category.

Returns and who pays

Trendyol gives the buyer a 15-day withdrawal window from delivery, and the return code remains valid for a further 14 days, so a return can legitimately arrive up to 29 days after delivery. For missing, defective or wrong-item claims the window is 30 days and the seller must consider the request.

More significantly, the seller pays return shipping, and this is Turkish regulation rather than Trendyol policy. Under the Distance Contracts Regulation, when a consumer exercises the right of withdrawal all payments collected including delivery costs must be refunded, so it is not possible to require the consumer to bear return postage separately. There is no distinction between a change of mind and a defect — the seller pays either way.

On eBay the seller sets the returns policy within eBay’s framework, including the length of the window and who pays for return postage in many categories, subject to the Money Back Guarantee.

Platform risk on each side

Both platforms carry the ordinary risks of selling on someone else’s real estate. Trendyol has two documented specifics worth knowing before you commit inventory.

In July 2023 the Turkish Competition Authority found that Trendyol’s operating company had breached Article 6 of Turkey’s competition law by intervening in its own marketplace algorithm and by using third-party seller data for its own retail and private-label operations. It imposed a fine of just over 61 million lira along with remedies barring both practices. The decision is under appeal and we found no ruling on that appeal.

A second, separate case examined Trendyol’s automatic pricing tool and closed in October 2024 with binding commitments rather than a fine: Trendyol agreed to remove its match-the-buybox-price option, not to make automatic pricing mandatory or incentivise it equivalently, and not to use its adoption as a ranking criterion, reporting to the authority for three years. These are two different cases and should not be run together.

Beyond the regulatory record, the recurring seller complaints on Turkish consumer forums cluster around total take-rate once shipping and the per-shipment fee are added, disputes over the dimensional weight used to bill cargo, store closures including on linked-account grounds, and payout holds — one seller documented roughly 531,000 lira withheld from March 2026 with no stated reason across forty support tickets. These are anecdotes rather than data, and we present them as such, but the store-closure complaints are numerous enough to form a countable cluster and Turkish law firms market the topic as a practice area.

Which one is for you

Running both with FLUF Connect

Where a seller is eligible for both, the operational problem is the usual one: the same stock listed in two places and sold twice.

Neither Trendyol nor eBay requires a browser extension. Connect Trendyol with the credentials from your seller panel and follow eBay’s authorisation prompts. Trendyol listings take time to process, so check each item’s final status.

Trendyol’s registry entry in FLUF reflects what the channel actually supports rather than what would look best: sale detection, so an item sold elsewhere can be withdrawn from Trendyol stock, but not relisting or offer management, because Trendyol has neither listing expiry nor an offer system. Crosslisting and inventory sync are available on every paid plan; relisting, offer management and smart pricing are included from Seller upwards and apply to the channels that support them.

One honest caveat if you plan to run both: Trendyol’s ban on changing colour, size, brand or barcode after acceptance means corrections are expensive. Get the category and attribute mapping right before you push volume, because fixing it afterwards means deleting and recreating products rather than editing them.

Sources and verification

• Trendyol’s Seller Violation Policy — the “undamaged, unused” quality standard and the violation-points scale.
• Trendyol’s policy for non-local sellers in Saudi Arabia — the documentation required and the category gating.
• Trendyol’s seller application steps for the Turkish entity and invoicing requirements, and its commission page for the VAT-inclusive rule and the seller-level and women-entrepreneur modifiers.
• Trendyol’s platform service fee and its shipping threshold, plus the payout page for the delivery-based maturity clock and early payment.
• Trendyol’s create-product API reference — the required-field list, which contains no condition field — and its published rate limits.
• Trendyol’s returns policy and its shipping FAQ for the regulatory basis of seller-paid return postage.
• The Turkish Competition Authority’s 2023 self-preferencing decision and its 2024 commitment decision on automatic pricing.
• eBay’s 2024 full-year results, UK private seller fees, UK business seller fees, US seller fees and eBay on item specifics.
• Turkey’s Ministry of Trade e-commerce report for the 4.57 trillion lira market and 52.2% growth, Gemius’s 2025 reach panel, and Hepsiburada’s 2025 results as the only audited Turkish comparator.
• Trendyol’s acquisition of Dolap in 2018.

What we could not verify, and therefore left out. Any absolute gross merchandise figure for Trendyol — it is private, Alibaba reports it only inside a segment, and the numbers circulating online trace back to sites citing each other rather than to a source. Alibaba’s current shareholding, which was reported at 86.5% by the Turkish trade registry in 2021 but has not been disclosed in any filing since. The discount rate applied to Trendyol’s early-payment facility. Trendyol’s full dimensional-weight shipping price list, which sits behind the seller login. The certification requirements for selling refurbished goods in Turkey. And the outcome of the appeal against the 2023 competition decision, on which we found no ruling.

Related guides

• Sell on Trendyol — the complete seller guide
• Sell on eBay — the complete seller guide
• Crosslist from Trendyol to eBay
• Crosslist from Trendyol to Shopify
• All marketplace guides
• All crosslisting routes
• Amazon vs eBay — a catalogue against a listings board
• Crosslist from Shopify to Trendyol
• Crosslist from Trendyol to Amazon
• Crosslist from Trendyol to Etsy