E-commerce in Türkiye is governed by a two-layer framework, and getting the layers straight is the first compliance decision a business has to make. The Law on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce No. 6563 governs the relationship between platforms and the sellers on them, together with disclosure, ordering and commercial-communication duties, while Consumer Protection Law No. 6502 and the Distance Contracts Regulation govern the relationship with the consumer who buys. A marketplace operator sits in both layers at once; a brand selling through a marketplace sits mostly in the second, but is bound by the first through the intermediation agreement it signs.
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Law No. 6563 was substantially rebuilt by Law No. 7416 in 2022, which introduced the vocabulary the regulator now uses: the electronic commerce intermediary service provider (ETAHS), which operates the marketplace, and the electronic commerce service provider (ETHS), which sells on it or on its own site. Two implementing instruments carry most of the operational detail: the Regulation on Electronic Commerce Intermediary Service Providers and Electronic Commerce Service Providers and the Communiqué on the Electronic Commerce Information System (ETBİS).
Who the Law Applies To and Who Falls Outside It
Article 2 of Law No. 6563 defines an intermediary service provider as a person who provides the electronic commerce environment in which others carry on their economic activity. The 2022 amendments narrowed the heavier obligations to the subset that actually allows contracts to be concluded or orders to be placed, which is why a classified-advertisement site and a transactional marketplace are treated differently.
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Article 1(3) takes a further group outside the two new categories: undertakings authorised under the banking, insurance, payment services, capital markets, private pension, financial leasing, factoring and financing, travel agency, civil aviation and electronic communications statutes, together with licensed operators of games of chance and betting, are not treated as an electronic commerce intermediary service provider or an electronic commerce service provider where they operate exclusively in the field for which they are authorised. A payment institution is therefore regulated as a payment institution, not as a marketplace or seller under Law No. 6563, for its licensed activity.
ETBİS Registration and the Thirty-Day Reporting Set
Registration with ETBİS is a precondition of activity, not a follow-up formality. Under the ETBİS Communiqué, service providers operating their own e-commerce environment, intermediary service providers, and providers established in Türkiye that trade only through a marketplace established abroad must register before beginning activity, entering the MERSİS number and tax identification number (or, for tradespeople and artisans, the national identity number and tax identification number) together with the domain name and the mobile application.
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A second, longer list of notifications follows within thirty days: the registered electronic mail (KEP) address for service, the type of e-commerce carried on, payment methods offered, whether second-hand goods are listed, the banks and payment institutions used, the cargo operators used, the infrastructure providers used, and the country and address where personal data and customer information are held, a question that runs directly into the separate personal data protection analysis. Cross-border volume is reported annually by the end of March; changes and cessation of activity within thirty days. Registered providers are published on the Ministry’s eticaret.gov.tr site, where a counterparty can check whether a trader is registered at all.
Pre-Contractual Disclosure, Order Confirmation and Commercial Messages
Article 3 of Law No. 6563 requires the service provider, before the contract is concluded, to supply its identifying details, the technical steps to be followed in concluding the contract, whether the contract text will be stored, the technical means for identifying and correcting data-entry errors, and its privacy rules together with any alternative dispute-resolution mechanism. Article 4 adds that, before payment information is entered, the buyer must be able to see the terms of the contract including the total price payable, and that receipt of the order must be confirmed without delay.
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Both articles carry a flexibility that matters commercially: where the parties are not consumers the opposite may be agreed, and their core disclosure and ordering duties do not apply to contracts concluded exclusively by e-mail or similar individual means of communication. A business-to-business supply flow and a consumer-facing storefront therefore cannot be run on the same set of texts, and the difference has to be drafted rather than assumed.
For commercial electronic messages, Article 6 sets the rule of prior consent. Two points are regularly missed. Where the recipient has supplied contact details in order to be contacted, no separate consent is needed for messages about changes to, use of, or maintenance of the goods or services actually supplied. And messages may be sent to tradespeople and merchants without prior consent, the business-to-business carve-out that a marketing database has to be segmented to reflect. Where a recipient refuses further messages, that refusal must be given effect within three business days under Article 8.
Selling to Consumers: Distance Contracts
Article 48 of Law No. 6502 defines the distance contract and fixes the core consumer entitlements. Delivery must occur within the promised period and, other than for goods made to the consumer’s own specification, never later than thirty days. The consumer has fourteen days to withdraw without reason or penalty; the burden of proving that the consumer was informed of that right sits on the seller, and a consumer who was not properly informed is not bound by the fourteen-day period at all, subject to a one-year outer limit.
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Two changes took effect together on 1 January 2026: the suspension of the 2022 amendments ended, and the amending regulation of 24 May 2025 rewrote part of them. Under the rule in force today, a consumer who returns the goods through the carrier named by the seller in the pre-contractual disclosure cannot be held liable for the return costs, and if the seller named no carrier, no charge may be demanded from the consumer as return costs. If the designated carrier has no branch where the consumer is, the seller must arrange collection at no additional cost; on a marketplace, where that shortfall is attributable to the intermediary, the intermediary bears the cost. The fourteen-day refund period runs from delivery of the goods to the designated carrier or, where another carrier was used, from the goods reaching the seller. A seller-side checklist for that change is set out in our note on Türkiye’s distance contracts regulation from 1 January 2026.
Marketplaces are drawn into these consumer duties directly. Article 48(6) of Law No. 6502 makes the intermediary jointly and severally liable with the seller for pre-contractual disclosure and its proof, liable for gaps in mandatory disclosure where the intermediary entered the data, and, where it collects the price on the seller’s behalf, jointly liable for delivery and withdrawal obligations, except where the price was passed to the seller after delivery. Article 48(5) of the same Law goes one step further and requires the intermediary to build, and keep uninterruptedly open, a system through which consumers can submit and track the requests and notifications identified in the regulation (withdrawal notices, termination notices, refund requests, requests for transaction records and delivery complaints) for as long as the rights arising from the contract can be exercised; the Regulation adds the duty to retain transaction records for three years.
Marketplace Conduct: Per-Se Unfair Practices
Additional Article 1 of Law No. 6563 is the provision sellers most often need. It prohibits unfair commercial practices generally, then lists conduct that counts as unfair in every case, with no balancing exercise available to the platform.
| Conduct | Rule | Practical effect for a seller |
|---|---|---|
| Late payout | Payment in full within 5 business days of the later of (i) the price coming under the marketplace's disposition and (ii) the order reaching the buyer | Payment to a payment provider inside the marketplace's economic unity counts as payment to the marketplace |
| Forced campaigns | No unilateral change to the sale price; no compulsion to sell on campaign | Discount participation must be consensual |
| No written agreement | Terms must be set by a written or electronic intermediation agreement that is clear and accessible | An undocumented commercial relationship is itself the breach |
| Retroactive amendment | No retroactive or unilateral change against the seller, and no clause permitting one | Such a clause is unlawful even if never used |
| Undisclosed fees | No charge where no service was given, or where the fee is not stated in the agreement | Fee schedules must be contractual, not announced |
| Retaliation and arbitrary delisting | No demotion, restriction, suspension or termination absent an objective criterion in the agreement, or because the seller applied to a public authority or court | Applying to the Ministry or a court cannot lawfully trigger delisting |
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The regulation adds procedure to the last row. Before restricting, suspending or terminating the service the marketplace must state its reasons clearly, give the seller at least three business days to explain, and notify its decision within seven business days of receiving the explanation. That protection has a real exception: where the matter arises from legislation, concerns public order, is urgent, or involves fraud, a data breach or another cyber-security risk, the service may be cut immediately with reasons given afterwards. We set out the remedies available to a seller in that position in our guide to marketplace seller rights in Türkiye. These terms are set at the drafting stage, alongside the rest of the commercial contracts stack.
Notice-and-Takedown and Intellectual Property Complaints
Two separate procedures run in parallel, and confusing them is a common source of failed complaints.
| Stage | Unlawful content generally | Intellectual and industrial property |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | Awareness of unlawfulness (compliance report, notified court decision, notice from the Ministry or another authority) | Rights holder's complaint supported by documentary evidence |
| Formal requirements | Set by the source of the notice | Registration certificate, banderole form or collecting-society certificate; identity and contact details; grounds and evidence; listing URL; liability declaration |
| Removal | Without delay, and within 48 hours at the latest | Without delay, and within 48 hours at the latest |
| Notification | To the seller and the relevant public authority, with reasons | To the seller and the rights holder, stating how to object |
| Counter-notice | Not applicable | Invoices and a document chain tracing the goods back to the rights holder |
| Republication | Not applicable | Within 24 hours where the objection is clearly well founded |
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The marketplace’s examination is expressly limited to the documents supplied: it is not an adjudication of the underlying right, and the parties keep their ordinary recourse to the courts and administrative authorities. A repeat complaint on the same product and allegation is not processed unless new proof is produced. The mechanics of filing and answering these notices are covered in our note on reporting counterfeit goods on a Turkish marketplace, and platform notices sit alongside the border and enforcement measures handled under anti-counterfeiting and customs.
Size Thresholds, Licensing and Penalties
Obligations under Law No. 6563 scale with net transaction volume: the value of final invoices for contracts and orders, excluding cancellations and returns. For marketplaces, Additional Article 2 sets base thresholds of ten billion Turkish lira, thirty billion Turkish lira with more than 100,000 transactions, and sixty billion Turkish lira with more than 100,000 transactions, and the implementing regulation labels the resulting tiers medium, large and very large; the parallel tiers for sellers on their own platforms also require more than ten million transactions. These lira figures are base amounts. They are uplifted every year by the annual change in e-commerce volume calculated from ETBİS data, and the Ministry announces the updated thresholds on its website by the end of February. Under the announcement of 27 February 2026 (a change of 48.07 per cent), the thresholds applied to net transaction volume for 2025 are TRY 79,180,975,103 (medium), TRY 237,542,925,308 (large) and TRY 475,085,850,615 (very large). Crossing a threshold does not bite immediately: the additional duties apply from the start of the following calendar year or must be met within its first three months.
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A marketplace whose net transaction volume exceeds the first threshold and which handles more than 100,000 transactions must hold a licence from the Ministry of Trade, applied for in the year after the threshold is crossed and renewed each year while it is exceeded, in both cases in March. The fee is calculated on graduated bands of net transaction volume. Export sales are excluded from the calculation, and, provided the marketplace’s net transaction volume does not exceed 20 per cent of total e-commerce volume, twice the export sales and the incentivised investment expenditure realised in the following year is deducted from net transaction volume. At the large tier, advertising and discount budgets are capped by formula and may be spent at no more than a quarter per quarter, and the marketplace may not restrict a seller from selling or advertising through alternative channels, a restriction whose logic overlaps with competition law. At the very large tier the law separates the marketplace from adjacent businesses: banks and financing companies in its economic unity may not offer their services, lending included, on the marketplace (credit-card payments excepted), electronic money issued by affiliated institutions may not be accepted there, and the marketplace may not itself carry goods by road, act as a freight forwarder or provide postal services for sales made on it. Two carve-outs matter: the own-brand rules do not apply to goods bearing the brand of persons earning more than half of their total sales revenue outside e-commerce, nor to periodicals, books and e-readers.
Enforcement is by administrative fine imposed by the Ministry, and the design is deliberately escalating: proportionate fines calculated on net sales for the most serious breaches, doubling on repetition within a year or on failure to remedy in the time given, tenfold where the Ministry was misled, and, for a defined group of breaches, a sequence of fines followed by a content-removal or access-blocking decision, which is challenged before the criminal judgeship of peace. The lira figures in Article 12 are nominal amounts fixed when the provision was enacted and are revalued annually by Ministry communiqué (for 2026, the communiqué published in the Official Gazette of 25 December 2025), so the current year’s figures should always be read from that communiqué rather than from the face of the statute.
What Changes for E-Commerce Marketplaces in 2027
A deferred annulment decision of the Constitutional Court (12 February 2026) will reshape platform liability on two points. Article 9(1) of Law No. 6563, the general shield against liability for seller content, has been annulled in respect of consumer contracts, and Article 48(6)(d) of Law No. 6502 has been amended by annulment so that the exercise of the defective-goods remedies in Article 11 is no longer carved out of the intermediary’s joint liability. Both take effect on 2 March 2027. The present rules continue to apply until that date, but a marketplace designing its seller onboarding, escrow and recourse arrangements now should build for the position after it rather than the position before.
Our Approach
We act for online sellers, for marketplace operators, and for brands whose products are traded on Turkish platforms without their consent: from registration and contract architecture through complaint handling to disputes with platforms and Ministry of Trade proceedings, and, where a matter turns on imported stock, alongside our customs practice. Contact us to discuss how Law No. 6563 and the distance-selling rules apply to your operation in Türkiye.
