Spring Break
Summer Stories - Chris Tyler, Istanbul
MBA '09, OI
Issue date: 9/2/08 Section: News
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Yemeksepeti is an e-commerce platform for restaurants that deliver. A consumer can browse restaurants that deliver to her neighborhood, place the order online, and have the restaurant (not yemeksepeti) deliver the food to her house. For consumers, yemeksepeti is a replacement for a drawer full of delivery menus and a phone call to the restaurant. For restaurants, it's a source of new orders and a way to provide targeted marketing to potential customers. Former New Yorkers will recognize this concept - it's the same business as seamlessweb.com, although with less of a corporate focus.
Yemeksepeti takes a small commission for each order that it sends to a restaurant. It does not charge any kind of recurring membership fee to restaurants, so restaurants only pay when yemeksepeti sends them business. This summer yemeksepeti was processing about 12,500 orders a day, and this number continues to rise as they expand to new cities in Turkey and internet penetration in Turkey increases. Restaurant marketing is yemeksepeti's other source of revenue. Restaurants can target customers through yemeksepeti's 400,000 member user base with email and website marketing that is much more effective than distributing menus to apartment buildings.
I spend my summer helping yemeksepeti develop an international expansion strategy. Their business is very scaleable, and there are lots of countries and major cities that don't have their type of service. We narrowed down a long list of fourteen countries to five top candidates, and we visited two countries for market research visits where we met with restaurant owners and consumers. I also designed how they would expand to these new countries, helping the founders decide what functions should be centralized in Istanbul and what functions would be run by the international branches.
But enough of the details about the company and what I did. Let me give you my take on the most interesting parts of the experience:
The rest of the world is catching up with America very quickly. I didn't know what to expect from a home-grown Turkish e-commerce company, and I found that much of yemeksepeti's success came from strengths that American companies are usually known for. The company's website and sophisticated order processing system were all built in-house by a top-notch group of programmers, all born and educated in Turkey. The three founders (all 32 years old) understood strategy and competitive advantage as well as any of the executives I worked with at Fortune 500 companies as a consultant before business school. And yemeksepeti's cutting edge hardware and software came from the same multinational companies that would supply any Silicon Valley startup. I was impressed to find a company that was best in class globally, not just on the local stage.
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