Amazon doesn’t reign on all countries. Discover local champions.

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 261

News 1. Trendyol is Turkey’s champion — with AliBaba

Trendyol is about to raised $1.5 billion, a very large funding for the local Turkish e-commerce champion. It offers a typical “mail ordering” assortment of fashion, electronics and cosmetics. AliBaba acquired Trendyol in 2018 and has invested over 1bn so far. The next financing round will solidify the e-commerce leadership in Turkey. Opinion: Trendyol covers more than Turkey and more “verticals”. Available in Germany with a site, and a Trendyol fashion collection on Zalando. A site for second-hand Dolap and a delivery service Trendyol Express.

Definitely a local champion, with big stakeholder behind. Amazon is not alone!

News 2. Allegro, the Polish champion on many verticals

Allegro is a mix of E-bay and Amazon for the Polish market, dominant and already listed on the stock exchange. It runs allegro.pl with a full assortment but also is present with payment PayU, price comparison Ceneo, used car OtoMoto and finance comparison and blog Bankier.

Opinion: Allegro footprint in Poland is strong. However, Amazon launched a dedicated Polish site (was not available yet — quite amazing, isn’t it?) in Spring 2021. And Amazoin has large logistics operations in Poland, delivering neighbour countries like Germany.

A match starts: Amazon vs. local champion. To follow-up in Poland!

News 3. Well-known in France only, Cdiscount

Cdiscount is a veteran of e-commerce in France, founded in 1998. It was sold to food retailer specialist Groupe Casino in 2000. Cdiscount (phonetically “C’est discount” — it is discount) is still today a very strong contender (20% SOM) to Amazon (53% SOM). Cdiscount pushes innovations like reusable packs and B2B platform Octopia.

Opinion: Name it a success: founded in the early days on e-commerce, bought by a large retailer… it sounds like everything would go wrong. It didn’t. Cdiscount is well-established, as a brand, as a distributor (3 large warehouses) and always with the discount reputation, sticking to the name.

Cdiscount, famous in France, un-known everywhere else. A discovery.

Author is the research team (10 trend scouters) at specialist Space and Lemon Innovations (Hamburg, Berlin) — scouting innovations in main tech geographies, AI development, virtual worlds and e-commerce. Excerpts of research are gathered here in original weekly news since 2016, always with an opinion — no re-write of TechCrunch.

Come back next Monday and share your opinion.