Consumer Law Compliance for Sellers and Importers

We act for sellers, producers, importers and marketplace sellers across that framework: screening terms before the Ministry does, building the warranty and after-sales file the statute actually requires, and defending the file when a consumer applies to an arbitration committee or a provincial trade directorate opens a sanction record.

The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulation (Official Gazette of 17 June 2014, No. 29033) annexes a list of terms that count as unfair, and its Article 5/4 states that the list is illustrative rather than exhaustive. Clauses that recur in Turkish standard terms and appear on that list include automatic renewal of a fixed-term contract for the same period, unilateral variation without a justified reason set out in the contract, disproportionately high compensation from a defaulting consumer, and any clause that disproportionately restricts the evidence a consumer may adduce or shifts a burden of proof the law places on the business.

One limit works in the company’s favour and is worth knowing before a term is redrafted: under Article 5/7 of the Law, provided the terms are written plainly and intelligibly, no unfairness assessment may be made of the balance between the principal obligations or between the market value of the goods and the contract price. Price is outside the screen; the drafting that surrounds it is not.

Enforcement is staged rather than immediate. Under Article 8/2 of the Regulation the Ministry gives the drafter thirty days to remove an unfair term from contracts prepared for general use, extendable to ninety days, and Article 77/2 of the Law applies a fine per contract only if the term is still there when that period expires. Article 8/3 offers a cure for contracts already signed: where the drafter notifies consumers clearly, in writing or electronically, that the term is absolutely void, the term is treated as removed from those existing contracts as well.

After-sales duties sit further up the chain. Article 58 obliges the producer or importer to provide maintenance and repair for the usage life fixed by the Ministry, to hold an approved after-sales service adequacy certificate for listed goods, and to keep all authorised service station data current in the Ministry’s system. Under Article 7/1 of the After-Sales Services Regulation that certificate is valid for two years and must be renewed before it lapses, and Article 14/1 makes the producer or importer jointly and severally liable with the service station even where the station is a separate legal entity. This is the point most often missed when service is outsourced. Two further rules bite in practice: during the warranty period the consumer cannot be charged for carriage, postage or a technician’s travel unless the fault came from use contrary to the manual, and outside the warranty period, where the same fault recurs within one year in connection with an installation, maintenance or repair service the station has provided, no charge of any kind may be made, save, again, for faults caused by use contrary to the manual. The allocation of these duties between the importer, the distributor and the service network is set out in our note on warranty and after-sales service obligations for importers in Türkiye.

Where the goods are sold online, the distance-selling layer is added rather than substituted: pre-contractual information whose completeness the seller must be able to prove, a fourteen-day withdrawal right, and delivery within thirty days for goods that are not made to the consumer’s own specification. The clauses that had to change when the amended rules took effect are set out in our seller’s checklist on Türkiye’s Distance Contracts Regulation from 1 January 2026, and the platform-side duties that sit alongside them are covered in e-commerce and marketplace law.

Three features shape how a company should answer. Decisions bind the parties and are enforced under the rules for enforcing court judgments, so an unanswered file returns as an enforcement proceeding. The committee cannot award attorney fees, which changes the economics of a low-value dispute. And Article 70/6 contains a rule that rewards full disclosure at the administrative stage: where a decision in the consumer’s favour is later annulled, the consumer normally bears a proportional attorney fee, unless the annulment rests on a document that existed at the time and was never put before the committee, in which case no costs and no attorney fee may be awarded against the consumer at all.

Objections go to the consumer court within two weeks of notification under Article 70/3, do not suspend enforcement unless the judge orders an interim stay on request, and produce a final decision under Article 70/5. Above the threshold the claim is a court claim, and Article 73/A makes mediation a condition precedent, subject to five statutory exceptions, three of which matter to a seller: disputes within the committee’s own jurisdiction, objections to committee decisions, and consumer disputes arising from rights in rem over immovable property (the remaining two cover the preventive and cessation actions that consumer organisations, public bodies and the Ministry may bring under Article 73/6, and the actions to suspend production or sale and recall the goods under Article 74). Where a consumer file develops into a wider commercial dispute, it is handled together with our work on commercial litigation and arbitration, and the underlying documents are reviewed alongside the drafting work described under commercial contracts.

The alternative is Article 77/A. A settlement request filed within fifteen days of notification, and only before an administrative court application has been made, suspends the period for bringing that action, allows a reduction of up to fifty per cent, cannot be combined with the prompt-payment reduction under the Misdemeanours Law No. 5326, and ends in a minute that is final and cannot afterwards be challenged. Choosing between the two routes is a question of evidence: settlement is built for a genuine difference of interpretation, annulment for a decision that misapplies the provision.

Two quantitative points frame the exposure. The fine amounts printed in Article 77 are nominal figures revalued each year, and for 2026 they were set by a separate communiqué on the Article 77 fines published in the same Official Gazette of 23 December 2025, No. 33116, so the applicable figure is always read from the current year’s table. And Article 77/19 caps the aggregate: once the total administrative fines imposed in a calendar year pass the stated floor, the total may not exceed five per cent of the company’s gross revenue for the previous financial year, and the capped total may neither fall below that floor nor rise above the statutory ceiling (banks, consumer lenders and card issuers have a separate cap based on equity). Several paragraphs are carved out of that cap, and the revenue-based limit does not apply at all where gross revenue was not declared or was declared incorrectly. Product-side breaches that also engage the safety regime are handled under product safety and market surveillance, where a separate authority, a separate procedure and a separate set of fines apply to the same goods.