The Importer's Two Certificates in Türkiye: Warranty and After-Sales Service Competency (Consumer Law Arts. 56 and 58)

An importer bringing listed goods into Türkiye owes two distinct documents, and confusing them is the most common compliance failure in this area. Under Article 56 of Consumer Protection Law No. 6502, manufacturers and importers must draw up a warranty certificate (garanti belgesi) for goods produced or imported for consumers, with the content set by regulation — while responsibility for completing that certificate and handing it to the consumer sits with the seller. Under Article 58/2, manufacturers and importers must separately obtain a Ministry-approved after-sales service competency certificate (satış sonrası hizmet yeterlilik belgesi) for the goods specified by regulation, and must keep information on all their authorised service stations current in the system the Ministry maintains.

The first document travels with the goods. The second is a licence to be in the market at all for that product group. They are governed by two different regulations, they are enforced by two different limbs of Article 77, and — as set out below — the second one outlives the importer that obtained it.

Two Certificates, Two Different Lists

Neither obligation is universal. Both are triggered by annexed lists, and a product can sit on one list and not the other.

Both regulations were last amended in 2020 — on 12 February and 5 November of that year — and the consolidated texts published by the Ministry carry no later amendment. Anyone reading the 2014 Official Gazette text alone will work from superseded figures.

What the Warranty Certificate Must Actually Say

Article 6 of the Warranty Certificate Regulation fixes the period: it begins on delivery to the consumer and equals a minimum of two years, or the value fixed by the unit of measurement in the annexed list. Where that different unit is used, the good must carry a mechanism allowing the unit to be measured, or its structure must permit measurement — failing which, the two-year minimum is deemed to apply. Time spent under repair is added to the warranty period.

Article 7/1 then lists what the certificate must contain: the trade name, address, telephone and other contact details of the manufacturer or importer, with the signature and stamp of its authorised person; the same details for the seller; the invoice date and number; the type, brand and model of the good with any band-roll and serial number; the date and place of delivery; the warranty period; the maximum repair period; confirmation that the whole of the good including all its parts is within warranty; information on the consumer’s Article 11 remedies; information on user error; and information that complaints may be taken to the consumer courts and consumer arbitration committees.

Three points in the surrounding text repay attention.

First, an invoice is not a warranty certificate. Article 5/3 says so in terms.

Second, repair does not restart the clock. Article 10 provides that a good replaced during the warranty process carries only the remainder of the original period.

Third, user error must be proved, not asserted. Article 11/1 disapplies the free-repair and escalation rights where the fault stems from use contrary to the user manual — but Article 11/2 requires the presence or absence of user error to be established by a report drawn up within the maximum repair period by the authorised service station, or, where there is none, by the seller, importer or manufacturer, with a copy given to the consumer. A service network that cannot produce that report inside the deadline has, in practice, conceded the point.

The Service Certificate Is an Infrastructure Obligation

Article 58/1 of Law No. 6502 requires manufacturers or importers to supply after-sales maintenance and repair services throughout the useful life determined by the Ministry. Article 5/1 of the After-Sales Services Regulation converts that into physical infrastructure: stations in the place, number and specification fixed in the annex, staffed with sufficient technical personnel, for the whole of that useful life.

Those figures are set per product group, not per company, and they are the item most often underestimated when a distribution model is priced.

Figures as they stand in the consolidated annexes to the Warranty Certificate Regulation and the After-Sales Services Regulation on 9 September 2026; the annexes are amended from time to time and must be checked against the current consolidated text for the specific product line.

The maximum repair period is a hard ceiling under Article 58/3 of the Law, and Article 10/4 of the Regulation fixes when it starts: on notification of the fault to the authorised service station or the seller during the warranty period, and on delivery of the good to the station outside it. The consumer may notify by telephone, fax, e-mail or registered post, and bears the burden of proving notification; the station bears the burden of proving it notified completion.

Two cost rules sit alongside it. Article 14/4 requires the manufacturer or importer to allocate a similar good for the consumer’s use where a fault is not remedied within ten working days of delivery during the warranty period — although the same paragraph releases them from that duty if the consumer does not want a substitute, with the burden of proving that on the importer. And Article 10/2, as amended in 2020, bars authorised service stations from charging carriage, postage, courier or service-personnel travel costs during the warranty period, save where the fault stems from use contrary to the manual; Article 14/3 extends the same bar to manufacturers, importers and sellers. Article 12/1 completes the picture: manufacturers and importers may not refuse to sell spare parts on a consumer’s request.

Article 58/6: The Rule That Survives the Importer

The provision with the sharpest commercial consequences is Article 58/6 of Law No. 6502, repeated word for word at Article 14/5 of the After-Sales Services Regulation. Where the importer’s commercial activity ends in any manner, the seller, the manufacturer and the new importer are jointly and severally liable for the supply of maintenance and repair services throughout the warranty period. After the warranty period expires, the manufacturer or the new importer must supply maintenance and repair for the remainder of the useful life.

Read against the annex figures above, the exposure is easy to quantify and easy to miss. A company that takes over the Türkiye importation of a white-goods brand steps into a ten-year useful-life obligation for units it never imported, sold or profited from — units placed on the market by a predecessor whose records it may not hold. The statute attaches the duty to the role, not to the transaction.

That makes the successor question a diligence item rather than a boilerplate one, and it belongs in the same file as the termination and goodwill indemnity exposure examined in our note on terminating a distribution or agency agreement in Türkiye. Where a supply relationship is being restructured, the allocation of the legacy installed base, the transfer of service records, spare-part stock commitments and an indemnity for pre-transfer units are all matters for the commercial contracts drafting stage, not for the first consumer complaint after completion.

Article 58/7 supplies the private-law tail: where after-sales service is not provided by the manufacturer or importer during the useful life determined by the Ministry after the warranty period has ended, the consumer may claim compensation for the loss.

Outsourcing the Network Does Not Outsource the Liability

Article 58/4 permits manufacturers and importers to establish their own authorised service stations or to use existing stations or service organisations — but the permission is expressly conditional on their remaining responsible for the services those stations provide. Article 14/1 of the After-Sales Services Regulation states the consequence: the manufacturer or importer is jointly and severally liable together with the authorised service stations for the provision and conduct of after-sales services even where the station has a separate legal personality. Article 14/6 adds an active duty to ensure services are run in accordance with the legislation, to follow and check the stations’ work, and to remedy deficiencies identified.

Independent stations are separately regulated. Article 58/5 makes stations operating without ties to any manufacturer or importer liable to the consumer for the service they give, and — since the 2022 amendment — obliges them to display the phrase özel servis legibly and visibly in every medium and activity.

Documentation carries its own liability. Article 11 of the Regulation requires a receipt document on taking in a faulty good and a service slip on returning it, each with prescribed content, and since the November 2020 amendment both may be given through a durable medium — with paper compulsory on request, the consumer’s confirmation of receipt required, and the burden of proving that confirmation on the service station. Article 16 requires the records of every transaction the Regulation governs to be kept for three years. Article 13 requires replaced spare parts to be shown to the consumer during the warranty period and returned outside it.

Where the Obligation Does Not Bite

Three boundaries matter to a company that imports for business customers rather than consumers.

The consumer boundary comes first. Article 3/1(k) of Law No. 6502 defines a consumer as a natural or legal person acting for non-commercial and non-professional purposes. Goods imported for industrial use and sold to commercial buyers fall outside the consumer regime, and the parties’ warranty and service arrangements are governed by their contract and by the Turkish Code of Obligations instead.

The list boundary comes second, as set out above: both duties depend on the annexed lists.

The express exemption comes third. Article 15 of the After-Sales Services Regulation disapplies the Regulation altogether in respect of persons or organisations producing or importing solely for needs arising from their own use, otherwise than for a commercial purpose, and in respect of goods produced or imported to consumers’ special orders.

None of this touches the parallel obligations under the product safety regime. Article 9/1 of Product Safety and Technical Regulations Law No. 7223 requires the importer to put its name, registered trade name or trade mark and a contact address on the product, and to ensure that assembly, use and maintenance instructions and safety rules are in Turkish; Article 6 imposes compensation liability on the manufacturer or importer for damage caused by the product, with contract terms excluding or reducing that liability void, and limitation of three years from knowledge and ten years from the damage in any event. These sit on top of the consumer duties, and they are checked at the border as part of the conformity assessment described in our guide to importing goods into Türkiye. Some product groups add a further named role on top of that framework: for cosmetics, a designated responsible person must be established in Türkiye and the product notified before it is placed on the market, as set out in the responsible person for cosmetics.

Enforcement

Article 77 of Law No. 6502 splits the penalties along the same fault line as the certificates.

Breach of Articles 55 and 56 — the Turkish user manual and the warranty certificate — attracts an administrative fine calculated per unit: for manufacturers and importers, per good placed on the market; for sellers, per good sold to a consumer (Art. 77/6). The multiplier, not the headline figure, is what makes this material for a container-scale importer.

Breach of Article 58 is graded in Article 77/10. Sub-paragraph (b) sets separate fines for failing to obtain the after-sales service competency certificate, for failing to record service stations in the Ministry’s system or keep the record current — assessed per station — and for failing to maintain the minimum number of service stations during the certificate’s validity, again assessed per missing station. Sub-paragraph (c) then sweeps up every other breach of Article 58 with a fine per detected transaction.

The amounts in the Law are nominal figures revalued annually, and the statute itself refers the reader to the tariff table applicable from the start of each calendar year; the current figures should be taken from that table rather than from the body of the Law. Separately, Article 8 of the After-Sales Services Regulation provides that where a breach is established and the position is not corrected within the period given despite the General Directorate’s written warning, the competency certificate is cancelled — a sanction with far greater commercial effect than the fine.

Article 77/A allows conciliation with the Ministry where the person fined argues that the breach arose from insufficient grasp or misinterpretation of the Law, or from a divergence of view with the administration reflected in case law. The request must be made within fifteen days of notification and before any application to the administrative courts; making it suspends the time limit for bringing proceedings. Two limits deserve highlighting: the reduction may not exceed fifty per cent, and where conciliation fails, a fresh request cannot be made.

What This Means for the Contract File

The obligations in Articles 56 and 58 attach to the importer by operation of law, but almost every one of them is performed by somebody else — a dealer completing the certificate, an independent workshop doing the repair, a courier moving the unit. That gap is where the disputes arise, and it is a drafting problem before it is a litigation problem.

A distribution or dealer agreement for listed goods should therefore address, at minimum: who completes and delivers the warranty certificate and how delivery is evidenced; the service station’s obligation to open and close the Article 11 documentation within the maximum repair period; who supplies the substitute unit after ten working days and who owns it; spare-part availability commitments matched to the useful life in the annex rather than to the commercial term of the agreement; the thirty-day notification duty when the station network changes; and an indemnity chain covering both the per-unit fines under Article 77/6 and the per-station fines under Article 77/10. Where the arrangement involves a foreign principal, the same clauses need to survive termination — the reason the successor rule in Article 58/6, the import and export compliance perimeter and the wider duties set out on our consumer law compliance page belong on the same map from the outset.

The two certificates are cheap to obtain and expensive to reconstruct. The company that treats them as a launch-week formality is the company that discovers, some years later, that a statutory duty attached to a role it no longer wants.