A Turkish Store Built from Zero

Starting point

An empty domain, zero products, zero stock, one person. The question: can one person, without an agency team, build and run a store in Turkey that sells on its own site and on marketplaces at the same time?

On day one the supplier's catalog file held 62,719 products. Uploading all of them was easy; selling them was impossible. We built a curation pipeline filtering on cost, category and image quality; 600 products remained. Each got an original AI-written description and went into the store.

Then the model changed: own stock instead of dropshipping. The first batch arrived from two local manufacturers, and every item got our own barcode. Today the site carries 140 live products; few, but every one has passed through our hands.

One panel: five marketplaces, one stock

We priced marketplace integrators: 7,000 to 30,000 lira a year, and none of them took on product selection, content or pricing decisions. So we wrote our own hub.

The store is the master catalog and the only source of stock. Each marketplace gets its own title, description, price and category; any field left empty falls back to the site value. "Send selected" pushes products to Trendyol, Hepsiburada, Pazarama, Amazon and n11. Orders from every channel land in one table.

E-invoicing is live. Preview, approve, issue. There is deliberately no auto-issue; every invoice passes a human. Stock sync has a loss guard: if a channel price drops below cost, the product closes on that channel.

Prices follow a rule, not a feeling. After channel commission, shipping tier, packaging and a returns allowance, the floor is 20% net on marketplaces and 30% on the site. A product that cannot hold the floor is not listed. Audit: 139 of 139 products compliant.

Warehouse: a phone becomes a terminal

We bought no dedicated device for goods receipt. "Add terminal" in the panel turns a phone or laptop into a terminal through a link; a handheld barcode reader plugs in. Incoming boxes are counted against the expected list; an unknown barcode is matched once and the system remembers it.

The first intake counted 81 varieties, 418 units. Not a single number is written to stock until the count closes and the variance report is approved. The same scanning engine runs packing verification: a wrong item is caught before it enters the box. In a one-person operation that is the most expensive mistake; return shipping, a marketplace penalty and a bad review arrive together.

Phone system: it knows the caller by their order

The store's 0850 line runs through a robot switchboard. The robot steps in only when it is useful. If the caller's number matches an order, it offers "press 1 for order status, 0 for an agent" and reads the status. If there is no match, there is no menu at all; the phone simply rings.

Office-hours and holiday logic lives in the panel, not in the switchboard, so a rule change needs no restart. 28 Turkish announcements were pre-recorded; no live speech synthesis on the server. No answer means voicemail. The result: "where is my order?" is answered before it reaches a human, and a customer with a real question never gets lost in a menu.

Email: the inbox sorts itself

Email gets the same treatment. An assistant reads the inbox and separates carrier notices, platform alerts and real customer questions. Notices are filed and closed; a real question lands in front of us with its order, shipping status and a draft reply. We read and approve.

On the site: lost visitors and baskets

The stock theme's 404 page was in English with a search box as its only exit. The 404, empty-search and empty-cart pages became recovery pages that bring the visitor back.

The free-shipping threshold was set with a basket simulation and lowered once. Buying several of the same item earns a tiered discount. Product changes are pushed to search engines instantly; a separate audit covered visibility in AI search. Same-day dispatch and no-questions returns are the store's core promise.

Outcome and numbers

600 products were curated from 62,719, 140 of them live. Five marketplaces from one panel. E-invoicing live. The first marketplace order arrived in October and shipped on the promised day.

The operation is built on a one-person model: the day's time budget was mapped, and sustainable capacity on two-item baskets is 62 orders a day. As the system grows, automation will scale, not headcount.

Sales figures are not shared; the store is new and the data is not yet meaningful. What this case describes is the build: how an empty domain became a full operation running on human approval in ten weeks. We build the same setup for your brand.