What Building a Car Classified Marketplace for Turkey Taught Us About Localisation

Localisation isn't just translation. We learned that the hard way.
When we started adapting our classified marketplace for the Turkish car market, we assumed the hard part was language. Swap the text, adjust the currency to Turkish Lira, done. We were wrong by a wide margin.

Turkey has some genuinely unique requirements for buying and selling cars. The first thing that caught us off guard — vehicle inspection history matters enormously. Turkish buyers almost always want to see the ekspertiz report, a third-party technical inspection document, before serious conversation begins. Without a field for it, sellers felt the platform was incomplete. Buyers didn't trust listings that skipped it.

Then came plates. Turkish car listings almost always include the city code on the number plate — it signals where the car has spent most of its life, which affects rust, road condition wear, and even perceived value. Istanbul-plated cars are viewed differently from Ankara or Izmir ones. We needed that filter.
Payment behaviour was another surprise. Installment-based buying is common in Turkey. A simple "price" field wasn't enough — buyers wanted to see if the seller was open to taksit (installment) arrangements. One checkbox changed engagement noticeably.

The lesson wasn't technical. It was about sitting with real users in a specific market before assuming your generic feature set is enough.
Every country has invisible requirements. Turkey just showed us ours faster than most.