Trade minister Bolat touts export support and rising consumer protection as retail e-commerce jumps 52% in a year
Turkey’s e-commerce sector grew to exceed 4.5 trillion lira in 2025, Trade Minister Ömer Bolat has said, as online retail continued to expand rapidly despite a difficult year for global trade.
Speaking at an E-Commerce and Retail Summit, Bolat said the world economy had passed through a series of major shocks in recent years — from the pandemic and wars to energy and food-market crises and disruptions to logistics and supply chains — and that global growth was now expected to slow to around 3% this year amid a wave of protectionism driven by trade wars and sharply higher tariffs since early 2025, down from an average of 3.4% in 2024-2025. Global trade growth, he said, was expected to slow to 1.6% this year from 4.6% last year.
Bolat said internet usage in Turkey had reached 92.3% by 2026, with 60% of the population now ordering goods or services online.
According to data from Turkey’s Electronic Commerce Information System (ETBİS), Bolat said the country’s total e-commerce volume rose 52.2% year-on-year in 2025 to surpass 4.5 trillion lira, equivalent to $115.5bn — a 29% rise in dollar terms. Retail e-commerce alone grew 52% to reach 2.5 trillion lira.
E-commerce’s share of national income rose from 2.7% in 2019 to around 7% in 2025, Bolat said, with growth accelerating notably during the Covid-19 pandemic. The sector’s share of overall trade climbed to 19.3% in 2025, he added, while the number of e-commerce transactions rose from 1.36 billion in 2019 to around 6 billion in 2025; within that, retail e-commerce transactions rose from 380 million to roughly 2 billion over the same period.
By the end of 2025, some 634,000 businesses were engaged in e-commerce activity across Turkey, the vast majority of them SMEs. Of these, 75% were sole proprietorships, 21% limited companies and 4% joint-stock companies, reflecting what Bolat described as the sector’s broad-based growth.
Bolat said the ministry’s regulatory approach aimed to prevent anti-competitive practices and consumer welfare losses, foster a multi-player market structure, and stop sellers imposing unfair commercial terms on buyers or suppliers. He noted that Turkey, as a member of the EU Customs Union, had negotiated to avoid additional tariffs on its e-export products under the EU’s new e-import regulation, which came into force on 1 July.
On export support, Bolat said the ministry had held e-export summits in Istanbul and Ankara this year, with an e-commerce week planned for December. He said 134 companies had benefited from ministry support this year, receiving a combined 638m lira for e-export activities now covering 26 countries, with a goal of expanding this to 35 countries. A new e-export consortium model has also been introduced, with 15 companies taking part so far.
Marking Ahilik Week, a celebration of Turkey’s traditional guild culture, Bolat highlighted state lender Halkbank’s role in supporting small tradespeople, offering four-year working capital loans and five-year investment loans for vehicles, machinery and equipment at around half standard market rates. He said the bank had disbursed 853 billion lira across 4.76 million loans over 24 years, including 460 billion lira in the past three years alone, with 2025 a peak year at 178 billion lira across 257,000 disbursements. In the first eight months of this year, a further 137,000 disbursements worth around 123 billion lira had been made.
Bolat also detailed reforms to Turkey’s wholesale produce market law, aimed at strengthening the role of producer cooperatives and unions in fruit and vegetable trade and helping to ease price rises, with a draft law currently under review ahead of the next legislative session.
On consumer protection, Bolat said arbitration panels had resolved 2.769 million complaints worth 34 billion lira between June 2023 and August 2026. He added that unsafe products among those inspected had fallen from 32% in 2011 to just 1% in 2025, with 322,000 companies and 39 million products inspected in the first eight months of this year alone. Administrative fines totalling 2.24 billion lira had been imposed for unsafe products, unfair pricing and other trade violations, he said, with enforcement continuing on an ongoing basis.
