Şehir Fırsatı

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

~ the obituary ~

The daily deal had its Turkish moment around 2011 and it was total while it lasted. The newsletters arrived every morning whether you had asked for them or not, the television advertising was constant, and for about two years a discounted voucher was a normal way to decide where to eat. By 2013 the whole thing was already something people talked about in the past tense.

Şehir Fırsatı was the biggest of them, and it was not a Turkish idea. It launched in April 2010 as the Turkish site of CityDeal, the Berlin operation the Samwer brothers built to clone Groupon across Europe before Groupon could get there itself. That plan worked exactly as designed: Groupon bought CityDeal in May 2010, about a month after the Turkish site opened. Şehir Fırsatı was Groupon Türkiye for essentially its entire life, and kept the Turkish name on the door the whole time.

The category then did what categories do when thirty companies pile into one idea in eighteen months. Merchants worked out that half-price customers rarely came back at full price. Deal quality fell, then commissions fell with it, from the fat early splits down toward five percent. Turkish sector sales dropped by more than half. Sites closed in a run through 2012 and 2013 and the survivors got quieter every year.

The notice that went up on 24 August 2015 was four lines long. Groupon had ended its operations in Turkey as of that date and could not offer any new deals. Holders of unexpired vouchers were given an email address and a phone number. Three point six million registered members, around a hundred people in the office, and a support line for the paperwork.

~ the case file ~

~ the boom ~

At the peak there were something like thirty of these sites operating in Turkey at once, which for a market that size was absurd on its face. The economics only worked while merchants were still naive about what a deal customer was worth, and that education took roughly two years. After that the whole sector was competing to sell the same discounted hairdresser appointment to the same list of people.

~ what closed first ~

Turkey was not a one-off. Groupon shut Greece and Turkey quietly, and then on 22 September 2015 announced it was pulling out of seven more countries at once: Morocco, Panama, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Thailand and Uruguay, along with about 1,100 layoffs. The company's own explanation was that pushing its technology into more than forty countries did not pay for itself. Turkey was in the first, unannounced batch, which is its own kind of ranking.

~ the rest of the graveyard ~

The Turkish e-commerce graveyard from those years is long and mostly forgotten: Sporena, Pabbuc, Saklişehir, KuponGezgini, Memurfoni, Modajenik. Şehir Fırsatı is the one people still half-remember, partly because of the television advertising and partly because it outlived almost all of them. Markafoni, the bigger and better-loved Turkish shopping site, went two years after it.

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