I was recently invited to attend Eihracat Platformu in Istanbul, one of Turkey’s biggest ecommerce sector conference which aims to help businesses trade more online.
The event, which was arranged by Koza Digital, covered all aspects of multi-channel commerce and Digitl’s role was to help educate attendees about the UK’s e-commerce landscape and a session on international e-commerce.
It was really exciting to be there and to find out how our sector is operating internationally. There’s great appetite to sell high quality goods into the UK from Turkey and this is a rapidly expanding sector over there. Because it is still growing, it did make me realise just how established the UK’s e-commerce is, but also how much room it still has to develop.
It was also clear how much leadership we have in the UK ecommerce market and support on offer for businesses like Courageous – we have access to meetups and research into our sector which makes a big difference. Another big challenge for traders in Turkey, for example, is the lack of Paypal – which makes ebay trading much more complex. But there are some similarities across the world, such as a huge international desire to sell on Amazon because of its dominance.
Visiting and being invited to speak at the conference was a fantastic opportunity for Courageous and we got a lot from it, including building some important international relationships. We now have an Arabic partner in Koza which is great and will help us to add value to our clients there. Since visiting, we’ve also been able to help a client gain access to a supply of products from Turkey. And I’m also considering a plan to launch my very own Amazon store!
Ultimately there was lots to both take to Istanbul for businesses there to see how we’ve been working in the UK – but I also gained valuable insight into international best practice and look forward to applying lessons learned to Digitl’s business in the future.
