Sanalpazar

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

~ the goodbye ~

GittiGidiyor was the default and everybody knew it, so Sanalpazar put its terms in the advertisement instead. Three percent seller commission against the incumbent's double digits, and twelve installments at the cash price, which in Turkey has always been the line that actually moves a sale. Gold İnternet Teknolojileri opened it in 2009 as the marketplace arm of Gold Bilgisayar, an Istanbul computer distributor with a chain of technology stores behind it.

For six years it did the ordinary thing an also-ran marketplace does. It stayed in second place and it stayed real enough that a seller with a box of phone cases kept a Sanalpazar listing open next to a GittiGidiyor one. The volume was small enough to count by hand and large enough for the company's own January 2016 statement to quote it: 1,229 sellers owed money on 3,074 completed sales, all of which it said it had settled that day.

That statement is where the story turns. On 4 January 2016 four companies in the Gold group, among them its technology market chain and the hızlıal.com shopping site, asked the Istanbul Anadolu 4th Commercial Court for bankruptcy protection, and the court issued an injunction the same day. Sanalpazar's own company was not one of the four. That distinction was worthless in practice, because the banks treated the group as a single exposure and started holding funds, and within days the sellers were the ones sitting on money they could not reach.

The case ran three years and thirteen hearings. On 29 March 2019 the same court ruled that the companies could not be saved, with debts above 300 million lira, and ordered them into bankruptcy. Sanalpazar.com kept serving a working marketplace homepage until 18 July 2019, and after that date there is nothing in the archive at all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the three percent ~

Commission is the only lever a marketplace challenger has. GittiGidiyor had eBay money behind it from 2011 and no reason to compete on the number, so everyone who came at it arrived carrying a smaller one. What none of them could buy with a discount was the thing that decides where a Turkish seller lists, which is whether the buyers are already standing there.

The installment offer was the sharper half of the pitch. Twelve payments at the cash price is a real subsidy that somebody pays, usually the merchant or the bank, and it is also the most effective sentence in Turkish retail advertising. It works right up until the bank relationships stop working.

~ what a frozen account looks like ~

The January 2016 notice reads like a company that believes it will be fine. It explains that the four filings do not cover Sanalpazar's owner and that some banks are treating the whole group as one thing regardless. It tells sellers their buyers' payments are sitting either at the bank or in the company's accounts and are recoverable from either. It promises a fresh update at noon on 8 January.

DonanımHaber ran a thread titled the Sanalpazar creditors' club. That part I recognize without ever having sold anything there. Turkish forums in those years were where you went to find out whether a company was genuinely in trouble, because the trade press would print the press release and the forum would print the receipts.

~ the last capture ~

Nobody wrote a shutdown notice, so the archive has to do the dating. The homepage was still serving about 40 KB of live marketplace in July 2019, four months after the bankruptcy ruling, and the next capture of any kind is from October 2021 and returns an error. The domain came back in late 2024 carrying somebody else's site, and it does not answer at all now.

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