The first is the E-Commerce Law, No. 6563. Its 2022 amendments introduced tiered obligations for electronic commerce intermediary service providers, with additional duties at higher statutory thresholds. The second is the consumer framework under Law No. 6502 and the Distance Contracts Regulation. It allocates duties by role; it neither turns every seller or supplier duty automatically into a platform duty nor leaves an intermediary service provider with none. Pre-contract information, order, payment, refund and complaint processes should be mapped to the function each actor actually performs. The third is the internet content regime under Law No. 5651. The Constitutional Court annulled Article 9 in its 11 October 2023 decision; the annulment took effect in October 2024. That change is another reason a platform needs a current, combined map rather than a static reading of one statute.
The volume behind these questions is not small. The Ministry of Trade reported total e-commerce volume in Turkey at 3 trillion lira in 2024, up 61.7 percent on the year (ticaret.gov.tr). More sellers and more listings mean more moments where the three regimes meet a single transaction.
The practical work is mapping the applicable layers and roles together. A single listing or complaint can raise duties under more than one regime at once: a takedown question, a consumer remedy, and a record-keeping obligation, side by side. Reading one regime in isolation is how a compliant-looking process still leaves a gap. The artifact that closes it is a current, per-regime and per-role duty map, each duty tied to an owner and a legal basis.
Sources
Next: Marketplace ranking and algorithmic accountability: questions for the legal lead →