There is a statutory sequence, a payment deadline measured in business days, and a set of exceptions that decide most disputes.
Since 1 January 2023 a marketplace operating in Türkiye cannot simply switch a seller’s store off. Article 17/1 of the Regulation on E-Commerce Intermediary Service Providers and E-Commerce Service Providers allows a marketplace to restrict, suspend or terminate its service only on objective criteria set out in the intermediation agreement, and Additional Article 1/2(e) of Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce makes it a per se unfair commercial practice to demote, restrict, suspend or terminate a seller where the agreement contains no objective criterion at all — or where the reason is that the seller applied to a public authority or to a court.
Withheld money is governed by a separate, harder rule. Additional Article 1/2(a) requires payment in full within five business days, counted from the date the sale price entered the marketplace’s disposal and the order reached the buyer. This guide sets out both rules, the procedure that has to be followed before a store goes dark, and — the part that decides most files — the exceptions that sit in the very next paragraph of each provision.
What Must a Marketplace Do Before It Suspends a Seller Account?
Article 17 of the Regulation, issued under Law No. 6563, converts what used to be a platform policy into a statutory procedure. Article 35 brought it into force in stages: Article 17 and most of the text on 1 January 2023, the internal communication system in Article 18 on 1 July 2023, and the data-portability duties in Article 21 on 1 January 2024.
The marketplace must first identify a situation described in the intermediation agreement as one requiring restriction, suspension or termination. It must then state its reasons clearly and comprehensibly, request an explanation from the seller, and allow at least three business days for that explanation (Art. 17/2). Only if the explanation is inadequate, or none is given, may it act. The decision must be notified within seven business days of the explanation reaching it, or at the end of the three business days where no explanation was filed (Art. 17/3).
Two consequences follow that sellers routinely miss. Termination is not a proposal: under Article 17/4 the intermediation agreement is deemed terminated on the date the termination notice is given. And while a restriction, suspension or termination is in effect, the seller may carry out operations relating to existing orders only (Art. 17/5) — so the fulfilment obligations survive the account freeze.
There is also a route back. Where the marketplace lifts a restriction or suspension, or concludes a fresh agreement with a seller whose service it had ended, Article 17/6 requires it to restore access without delay to the marketplace information the seller previously reached.
The exception that swallows the notice period
Article 17/7 is the provision most disputes turn on. Where the measure follows from legislation, concerns public order, is one where delay is objectionable, or involves fraud, a data breach or other cyber-security risks, the service may be restricted, suspended or terminated immediately. The reason must still be notified to the seller without delay.
The first question in a suspension file is therefore not “did they give me three days” but “which limb are they invoking”. A marketplace pleading suspected fraud has a defence to the timetable; it has none to the requirement that an objective criterion exist in the agreement and that reasons be given.
| Step | Statutory period | Source | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Request for the seller's explanation | At least 3 business days | Reg. Art. 17/2 | Reasons must be stated clearly; a bare "policy violation" notice does not satisfy this |
| Decision after the explanation | Within 7 business days | Reg. Art. 17/3 | Runs from receipt of the explanation; if none is filed, from the end of the 3 days |
| Immediate action | No prior period | Reg. Art. 17/7 | Legislation, public order, urgency, fraud, data breach, cyber-security risk — reasons still owed without delay |
| Payout of sales proceeds | 5 business days | Law No. 6563, Add. Art. 1/2(a) | From the later of price entering the marketplace's disposal and delivery to the buyer |
| Contract amendment notice | 15 days / 30 days | Reg. Art. 16/2 | 30 days for fee increases, new contractual penalties, restriction or termination terms |
| Answering an application in the internal system | 15 days | Reg. Art. 18/1 | Result must be notified through the same system |
| Republication after a successful IP counter-notice | 24 hours | Reg. Art. 14/1 | Only where the objection is clearly well founded on the documents filed |
Withheld Payouts: Five Business Days, and Three Qualifications
The payment rule is the most useful provision in the statute for a seller whose cash flow has stopped, and the one whose scope is most often overstated. Additional Article 1/2(a) makes it unfair in every case to fail to pay the seller in full within five business days of the date the sale price entered the marketplace’s disposal and the order reached the buyer. Additional Article 1/3 closes an obvious gap: payments to a payment service provider within the marketplace’s own economic group count as payments to the marketplace.
Article 11/4 of the Regulation then explains how the clock is read. Where the marketplace’s merchant agreement with its payment service provider fixes a blocking period, and the marketplace takes the funds into free use earlier by bearing the cost, the price is deemed to have entered its disposal at the end of that blocking period; where no blocking period is agreed, on the day the funds became freely usable.
Three qualifications limit the rule:
- Set-off. Under Article 11/4(a), the marketplace is treated as having paid the price in full where it deducts its matured receivables from the intermediation service, or amounts it paid on the seller’s behalf under a court or administrative decision. The dispute then shifts to whether the receivable had matured and whether the fee had a basis in the agreement at all — Additional Article 1/2(d) makes it a per se unfair practice to charge a seller where no service was provided, or where the type of service and the amount or rate of the fee are not stated in the intermediation agreement.
- Instalments. Under Article 11/4(b), in instalment sales payment of the matured instalment alone counts as full payment of that instalment.
- Deferral. Article 11/5 states plainly that where the marketplace defers or suspends payments to the seller for purposes such as preventing unlawful activity or fulfilling obligations arising from legislation, the five-business-day rule does not apply. This is the provision a platform reaches for when a payout is frozen alongside a fraud investigation, and it is why the seller’s first written question should be whether Article 11/5 is being invoked and on what ground.
Delisting on an Intellectual Property Complaint
A single listing can be pulled without the account being touched. Article 9/3 of Law No. 6563 obliges the marketplace to remove a product on a rights holder’s complaint supported by information and documents, notify both sides, and — on the seller’s objection supported by information and documents showing the contrary — republish it.
Articles 12 to 14 of the Regulation put timing and content around that. The removal follows without delay and within forty-eight hours of the complaint. The objection must contain the objector’s identity, the grounds, and documents capable of proving the goods are genuine: invoices or equivalent documents, and the contracts or other evidence tracing the supply chain back to the rights holder or to someone authorised to place the product on the market. Where the objection is clearly well founded on those documents, the product is republished within twenty-four hours of the objection reaching the marketplace (Art. 14/1). Once an objection succeeds, the marketplace will not process further complaints on the same product and allegation unless new proof of infringement is filed (Art. 14/2).
The limit is set out in Article 14/3: the marketplace’s examination is confined to the information and documents obtained from the seller. It is not a tribunal, and a genuine product with a thin paper trail loses. Sellers who source through intermediaries should assemble that chain before they need it — the same discipline that governs commercial contracts generally. Rights of recourse to the courts and administrative authorities are expressly preserved by Article 14/4. The same procedure seen from the other end — what a rights holder’s complaint has to contain, and what the marketplace must do inside each statutory window — is set out in reporting counterfeit goods on a Turkish marketplace, and reading it is the fastest way to see which part of a complaint against you is defective.
The Intermediation Agreement Decides the Case
Article 15/1 of the Regulation lists what the agreement must contain, and each item is a hook. It must set out the intermediation services provided, the situations requiring restriction, suspension or termination and the processes applying to them, the service fees and the circumstances in which they change, the parameters used to rank or recommend products (including the effect of paid placement), the period for payments to the seller, information on the internal communication system, and what access the seller keeps to its data after the relationship ends. Article 15/3 carves out one thing: the marketplace need not disclose algorithms whose publication would let search results be manipulated to the buyer’s detriment.
Amendments are governed by Article 16/2. The default is fifteen days from notice; the period becomes thirty days where the change requires technical development by the seller, raises commission rates or other service fees, restricts, suspends or terminates the service, introduces a new contractual penalty, or otherwise upsets the balance of rights and interests. Article 16/3 then gives the seller a clean exit: before that thirty-day period expires, it may terminate the agreement without compensation by notice through the internal communication system, effective on the date of the notice. Two limits apply — changes in the seller’s favour are exempt from the fifteen-day wait, provided the seller is notified that the change is a favourable one, and amendments made compulsory by a regulatory or supervisory authority’s decision fall outside these periods altogether.
Since the 2025 amendment to the Regulation, a further practice is per se unfair: applying a contractual penalty without first requesting an explanation from the seller through the internal communication system, except where the situation triggering the penalty can be established from documents and records (Art. 11/2(ğ)).
General law reinforces this. Article 24 of the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 treats a clause allowing the drafter to amend the contract unilaterally to the other side’s detriment as unwritten; Article 25 forbids standard terms contrary to good faith or aggravating the counterparty’s position; Article 23 construes unclear terms against the drafter. Article 55/1(f) of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102 makes the use of standard business terms contrary to good faith an act of unfair competition, opening the remedies in Article 56 — declaration, cessation, removal of the resulting situation, damages where there is fault, and, at the court’s discretion, the value of the benefit the defendant could have obtained. Article 1530/1 adds that, unless otherwise provided, terms prohibited by commercial provisions are void — the natural home of the unilateral amendment clause that Additional Article 1/2(ç) of Law No. 6563 expressly forbids.
Consumer law does not help here. Article 5 of Law No. 6502 strikes down unfair terms in contracts concluded with a consumer, and a business selling on a marketplace is not a consumer. Sellers who assume otherwise lose time. Consumer law does bind the seller in the other direction, towards its own buyers: the Distance Contracts Regulation governs what the pre-contractual disclosure must say, and it changed with effect from 1 January 2026 — see the seller checklist for the Distance Contracts Regulation.
What a Ministry Complaint Achieves, and What It Does Not
The Ministry of Trade supervises compliance. Article 11 of Law No. 6563 gives it the power to regulate the activities of intermediary service providers and to determine the mandatory elements of the intermediation agreement; Article 12/7 gives it the power to impose the administrative fines, delegable to the relevant General Directorate at the centre and to provincial directorates in the field.
The fines are calculated per affected seller, which is what makes them meaningful. The amounts are revalued each year by a Ministry communiqué; those below are the figures applicable during 2026 under the communiqué published in the Official Gazette of 25 December 2025, No. 33118.
| Breach | Provision | Fine (2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Unfair commercial practice, general clause | Add. Art. 1/1 | TRY 28,620 – 286,206 per affected seller |
| Late payout | Add. Art. 1/2(a) | Not less than TRY 28,620 per seller; the unpaid amount for delays up to 30 days, twice that amount beyond 30 days |
| Forcing campaign sales; unilateral price change | Add. Art. 1/2(b) | TRY 1,431,033 per seller |
| Retroactive or unilateral amendment, or a clause permitting it | Add. Art. 1/2(ç) | TRY 28,620 – 286,206 per breach |
| Charging a fee with no service or no basis in the agreement | Add. Art. 1/2(d) | Ten times the amount unfairly taken |
| Demotion, restriction, suspension or termination with no objective criterion, or as retaliation for an application to authorities or courts | Add. Art. 1/2(e) | TRY 858,620 per affected seller |
Article 12/4 doubles the previous fine where the same breach recurs within one year of notification, and Article 12/5 multiplies fines tenfold where the conduct was carried out through acts designed to mislead the Ministry.
What none of this does is put money in the seller’s account. The fine is payable to the Treasury. No provision of Law No. 6563 obliges a marketplace to reopen a store or release a payout because a fine has been imposed, and nothing converts the sanction into a debt owed to the complainant. The complaint is worth filing for the record it creates; the money and the reinstatement come from the contractual route, run in parallel.
The Civil Route
The relationship is between two businesses and arises from both parties’ commercial enterprises, so it is a commercial action under Article 4 of the Turkish Commercial Code and is heard by the commercial court of first instance under Article 5. Simplified procedure applies below a monetary threshold that is revalued annually.
Where the claim is for a sum of money — the unpaid payout, damages for the interruption, an objection to be set aside, a negative declaration or restitution — Article 5/A makes an application to a mediator a condition of the action, and the mediator concludes the file within six weeks, extendable by a further two. Planning that step is part of any commercial litigation and arbitration strategy, not a formality to be discovered at the door of the court.
On the merits, Article 112 of the Code of Obligations puts the burden on the debtor to prove no fault can be attributed to it once performance has failed. Where the payment date is fixed by the agreement, Article 117/2 places the marketplace in default when that date passes, without notice, and Article 2 of Law No. 3095 allows commercial default interest at the central bank’s short-term advance rate even with no interest clause. Where a suspension has made continued performance intolerable rather than merely expensive, Article 138 permits adaptation and, in contracts of continuing performance, termination for the future rather than rescission — a structure that will be familiar to anyone who has worked through the termination of a distribution or agency arrangement.
Two procedural tools deserve early attention. Article 400 of the Civil Procedure Code No. 6100 allows the determination of evidence before proceedings, where there is a legal interest — presumed where the evidence would otherwise be lost or become significantly harder to advance. Article 389 allows an interim injunction where a change in the existing position would make the right significantly harder or impossible to obtain, or where delay would cause serious harm. And Article 11/3 of Law No. 6563 obliges both the marketplace and the seller to retain the information, documents, books and electronic records relating to their transactions for ten years — a disclosure lever that survives long after the account has been closed.
One development on the horizon changes the incentives. The Constitutional Court has annulled the first paragraph of Article 9 of Law No. 6563 — the provision exempting intermediaries from liability for unlawful content supplied by sellers — as regards consumer contracts, with the annulment taking effect on 2 March 2027. Marketplaces facing direct exposure to consumers will police their sellers harder, not more gently. The documentary discipline described above is the answer to that, and it is cheaper to build before a suspension than after one.
