A Turkish company that sells through its own website or app is an “electronic commerce service provider”; a company that lets others sell through its platform is an “electronic commerce intermediary service provider”. The distinction, drawn by the Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce, decides which of three regimes applies: the light information and order duties that bind every online seller, the registration and reporting duties of ETBİS, and the tiered obligations, budgets and licence that Law No. 7416 of 2022 added for marketplaces as they cross net transaction volume thresholds beginning at ten billion lira. Most startups meet the first two on day one and the third only if they succeed, but the third shapes the business model long before it applies, because investors price it. This article explains who registers with ETBİS and when, what Articles 3 to 5 of Law 6563 require of every seller, what “unfair commercial practice” means for a marketplace, the three volume tiers and the licence fee, and a Constitutional Court decision of February 2026 that will change intermediary liability from March 2027. It complements our guide to terms of service under Turkish law.
ETBİS: who registers, and before what
The Electronic Commerce Information System is run by the Ministry of Trade under the Communiqué on the Electronic Commerce Information System and Notification Obligations (Official Gazette 11 August 2017, No. 30151, as amended in 2019). Article 5 requires three groups of natural or legal persons to register before starting activity: service providers operating in their own electronic commerce environment, that is, anyone selling through their own site or app; intermediary service providers, that is, marketplaces; and service providers resident in Türkiye that carry out no domestic e-commerce activity but conclude contracts or take orders through a foreign-resident marketplace. A Turkish seller that sells only through a domestic marketplace is therefore not required to register, and Article 2(2) excludes contracts made exclusively by e-mail, phone, SMS or similar individual communication. Registration is made through e-Government with the MERSİS and tax numbers (or the identity number for tradesmen) and the domain names and mobile applications used. Article 6 lists the notifications that follow: the KEP address for service, the type of e-commerce, other commercial activities, the goods and services offered, payment methods offered, whether second-hand goods are sold, the banks and payment or e-money institutions used, cargo and logistics operators, e-commerce infrastructure providers, the country and address of the databases holding personal and customer data, and, for cross-border sales, the annual volume by country and payment method. Article 7 gives thirty days from registration for these notifications, thirty days for any change, thirty days to notify cessation, and requires the cross-border volume to be reported by the end of March each year. Registered providers are published on eticaret.gov.tr (Article 9). Failure to register is not free: Article 12 of Law 6563 attaches administrative fines to the Ministry’s secondary regulation and information obligations, and the ETBİS record is what the Ministry uses to compute the thresholds below.
What every online seller owes under Articles 3 to 5
Article 3 of Law 6563 requires a service provider, before a contract is concluded by electronic means, to present its identifying information in an easily accessible and current form; the technical steps to conclude the contract; whether the contract text will be stored by the provider and whether and for how long the buyer can later access it; the technical means for identifying and correcting input errors; and the applicable privacy rules and any alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. The provider must state any professional body and code of conduct it is subject to, and must enable the buyer to store the contract terms and general conditions. Article 4 governs the order: at confirmation and before payment details are entered, the total price and the contract terms must be clearly visible; receipt of the order must be confirmed without delay by electronic means; and effective tools for correcting input errors must be provided before the order. Article 5 requires commercial communications to identify the sender and to state clearly the nature and conditions of promotions, games and contests. Where neither party is a consumer, Articles 3 and 4 can be contracted out of; where the buyer is a consumer, they stack on top of the Consumer Protection Law No. 6502 and the Distance Contracts Regulation. Article 12 fines breaches of these duties in bands that are revalued annually.
The marketplace: unfair practices and the baseline duties
Law 7416 added Additional Article 1, which prohibits unfair commercial practices by intermediaries against the sellers on their platforms and lists practices that are always unfair: failing to pay the seller in full within five business days of the later of the sale price entering the intermediary’s control and delivery to the buyer; forcing the seller into promotional sales, including by unilaterally changing the sale price; not setting the commercial relationship in a written or electronic intermediation contract that is clear, comprehensible and easily accessible; making retroactive or unilateral changes to the seller’s detriment, or reserving the right to; charging for services not provided or not priced in the contract; and demoting, restricting, suspending or terminating a seller without objective criteria in the contract or because the seller complained to a public authority or court. Additional Article 2(1) adds baseline duties for every intermediary regardless of size: not to sell, or intermediate the sale of, goods bearing its own or its group’s brands on its marketplace (except brands whose owners earn more than half their turnover offline); to let sellers display their tax-document information on the marketplace; not to run search-engine marketing, without the sellers’ prior written or electronic consent, using their registered trade marks that form the main element of their ETBİS-registered domain names; and to verify sellers’ identifying information from documents or public electronic systems. Article 9, as rewritten in 2022, keeps the intermediary free of liability for sellers’ content unless it is aware of the illegality, requires prompt removal and notification to authorities when it is, and creates a notice-and-counter-notice procedure for intellectual-property complaints.
The three tiers: ten, thirty and sixty billion lira
Additional Article 2 then scales obligations by the intermediary’s net transaction volume in a calendar year, computed from ETBİS data and excluding cross-border transactions; Additional Article 2(10) indexes the lira thresholds each year to the growth of e-commerce volume, and the Ministry publishes the adjusted figures by the end of February, so the statutory numbers below are the base, not the current, thresholds. Above ten billion lira, an intermediary must use seller and buyer data only to provide intermediation and not to compete with its sellers; give sellers free and effective access to and portability of their sales data; not cross-promote its own other e-commerce environments; notify the Ministry within a month of shareholding changes reaching multiples of five per cent and of company formations and share acquisitions; file an annual audit report by an SPK-authorised auditor; and report on illegal content detected. Above thirty billion lira and one hundred thousand transactions, advertising spend in the following year is capped at two per cent of the CPI-adjusted net volume up to thirty billion and three per thousand above, and the same formula caps promotions, points, coupons and gift vouchers; both budgets are shared with group sellers pro rata and may be used at most one quarter per quarter; and the intermediary may not restrict sellers from selling or advertising through other channels at the same or different prices, or force them to source from anyone. Above sixty billion lira and one hundred thousand transactions, the intermediary may not enable group banks or financing companies to offer services on the marketplace beyond ordinary payments, may not accept group e-money or offer closed-loop payment instruments, may not carry out road haulage, freight forwarding or postal services for marketplace sales other than its own, and may not combine a classified-ads environment with a transactional one. Obligations bite from the start of the calendar year after the threshold is crossed, with a three-month grace for some; an intermediary that falls below the thresholds is released while it stays below. Additional Article 3 applies most of these tiered obligations, and the licence regime, by analogy to a company selling through its own site or app once its net transaction volume exceeds ten billion lira and its transaction count ten million, excluding cancellations and returns.
The licence
Additional Article 4 requires an intermediary with net transaction volume above ten billion lira and more than one hundred thousand transactions in a calendar year to obtain, and renew each March, a licence from the Ministry to continue operating. The licence is granted on proof of payment of the fee; there is no substantive test. The fee is progressive on net transaction volume: three per ten thousand of the portion between ten and twenty billion, then five per thousand of the portion between twenty and thirty billion, one per cent between thirty and forty, five per cent between forty and fifty, ten per cent between fifty and fifty-five, fifteen per cent between fifty-five and sixty, and rising further above that. At the upper bands the licence fee is the largest single regulatory cost a Turkish marketplace faces, and it is the reason very large platforms have restructured or capped growth in specific verticals. For a startup marketplace the practical point is different: the fee is on the seller’s transaction volume passing through the platform, not on the platform’s revenue, so a low-take-rate model reaches the fee bands faster than its revenue suggests.
The 2026 Constitutional Court decision
By its decision of 12 February 2026 (E. 2024/187, K. 2026/42), the Constitutional Court annulled Article 9(1) of Law 6563, the rule that an intermediary is not responsible for unlawful matters in sellers’ content and the goods or services it concerns, insofar as it applies to consumer contracts. The annulment takes effect nine months after publication of the decision in the Official Gazette, on 2 March 2027. Unless Parliament legislates in the meantime, marketplaces will from that date lose the statutory liability shield towards consumers and fall back on general principles, which in practice means a stronger duty to vet sellers and act on complaints, and a redraft of intermediation contracts to allocate the resulting exposure. Combined with the notice-and-takedown duties in Article 9(2)–(3), which remain, a marketplace should already be building the seller-verification and complaint-handling record that a court would expect.
We sell only on Trendyol and Hepsiburada. Do we register with ETBİS?
Not under Article 5(1)(a), because you have no e-commerce environment of your own. You would register under Article 5(1)(c) if you sold through a foreign marketplace such as Amazon.de or Etsy. The moment you launch your own site or app, register before the first sale.
Is a SaaS company selling subscriptions online an e-commerce service provider?
Yes, if contracts are concluded or orders placed over the network through its own environment. Articles 3 to 5 apply, ETBİS registration is required, and consumer sales add the Distance Contracts Regulation. B2B-only providers can vary Articles 3 and 4 by contract.
We are a marketplace approaching ten billion lira. What changes first?
The licence application in March of the following year, the data-separation and portability duties, the Ministry notifications on shareholding changes, and the annual audit report. Model the licence fee bands in the financial plan before the fundraising that will take you past thirty billion.
Related: ETBİS · take rate · marketplace liquidity · explicit consent for marketing.
Sources. Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce (Articles 2–5, 9, 11–12, Additional Articles 1–4, as amended by Law No. 7416); Communiqué on the Electronic Commerce Information System and Notification Obligations (Official Gazette 11 August 2017, No. 30151); Constitutional Court, decision of 12 February 2026, E. 2024/187, K. 2026/42, as noted in the official text of Law 6563. Statute links open the official Turkish texts on mevzuat.gov.tr.
This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Please seek legal support for an assessment of any specific matter.
