The Süleymaniye Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey (Image via Travel Busy)

As Turkey's economy grew from $200 billion in 2011 to almost $800 billion today, so did its internet penetration, which reaches 45% today. The country's online economy continues to soar, success stories like Yemeksepeti are making waves globally and confirming that Turkish e-commerce in particular is a sector to watch.

With strong and growing credit card penetration, internet usage, social media virality, and shipping infrastructure, it's a market that has a lot to offer new startups, whether launching domestically or entering from abroad.

A recent blog post by Sina Afra offers some highlights of Turkish e-commerce, showing data on credit card, internet, and social media usage as well as the volume of e-commerce transactions across the country.

Check out these tweetable stats below to learn more:

1. Turkey has 36 million internet users, 45% of the population as of June 2012, ranking 11^th in internet penetration globally. [tweet this stat].
    
2. Mobile penetration is at 88% in Turkey and 20% of the population has 3G [tweet this stat].
    
3. Turkey’s population of 73 million owns 89 million debit cards and 54 million credit cards [tweet this stat].
    
4. Turkey ranks 7^th in the world for number of Facebook users at 31.7 million [tweet this stat]. 
    
5. The country also ranks 11^th in the world on Twitter with 6.5 million users [tweet this stat].
    
6. Turkey has an estimated 10 million online shoppers [tweet this stat].
    
7. In 2012, Turkey had an e-commerce volume of US $12.7 billion (including classifieds revenues, travel, and merchandise) [tweet this stat]. 
    
8. Business to consumer transactions make up US $2.78 billion of that total [tweet this stat].
    

Chart created by Sina Afra (amounts in Turkish Lira).

Photo Credit: Moyan_Brenn.