GittiGidiyor

» see gittigidiyor.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

gittigidiyor launched in istanbul on 5 february 2001, three founders (serkan borançılı, burak divanlıoğlu, tolga kabataş) building the turkish version of ebay before ebay showed up. the domain itself is a joke that only makes sense in turkish: "gittigidiyor" is what an auctioneer shouts, roughly "going going". it filled the auction slot in a market that did not yet have amazon and was still on dial-up.

the site grew because it did the boring things first. a payment-holding system called sıfır risk (zero risk) protected both sides of a transaction back when turkish e-commerce trust was near zero. it added categories the way an old shopping mall added floors, mobile phones and cameras first, then everything else, right down to long-tail collectibles no local shop stocked. by the mid-2000s it was the default place a turkish buyer went if the item was rare and the seller was somewhere across the country.

ebay came in as a minority partner in may 2007, went to 93% majority in april 2011 for around $215 million, then took the remaining 7% in 2016. the brand stayed local. no "ebay turkey" rebrand, no forced product parity with the US site. it was the rare acquisition where the parent left the child alone and the child kept working, at least for a while.

i used gittigidiyor. anyone doing hardware in ankara in the mid-2000s did. that was the era when you sourced a specific graphics card or a used oscilloscope by refreshing a listing at 2am, msn window open, "sıfır risk" reassuring you that if the package never arrived the payment would come back. it was the closest thing turkey had to the classic ebay experience before the whole category got remade.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what actually killed it ~

trendyol is the short answer. the longer answer is that trendyol did not compete with gittigidiyor as a marketplace, it competed as a super-app. logistics, own delivery fleet, wallet, video, food, all bundled. the auction-first model that gittigidiyor was built on became legacy the moment shoppers stopped browsing categories and started opening one app that already knew what they wanted. hepsiburada was doing the same thing from the retail side.

ebay looked at the numbers in early 2022 and did the math. gittigidiyor at that point still had around 4 million active buyers feeding into ebay's global count, but the trajectory was clear. on 20 june 2022 ebay announced the closure. new listings ended that day, purchases ended 18 july, and the site officially went off on 30 september 2022. no acquirer, no relaunch under a new owner. just the door closing.

~ what remains ~

a whole generation of turkish sellers learned e-commerce on gittigidiyor. small shops that later moved to trendyol or hepsiburada started with sıfır risk auctions and shipping labels printed at the post office. the founders (borançılı especially) went on to seed the next wave of turkish startups. the site itself just stopped. no archive mode, no read-only preservation. the domain still exists but points at nothing useful.

the interesting bit historically is that gittigidiyor is one of very few cases where ebay bought a foreign competitor, left it alone, and lost anyway. it was not killed by ebay policy or a bad integration. it was killed by a local competitor that changed what shopping meant, at a speed that a marketplace built for 2001 could not match.

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