New Advertising and Discount Rules in E-Commerce: A Practical Guide for Sellers

As of 1 August 2026, a new set of rules applies to commercial advertising and unfair commercial practices in Türkiye. The amendment, prepared by the Ministry of Trade and published in the Official Gazette on 1 July 2026, came into force today after a one-month transition period.

This is not only a large-marketplace issue. A small business selling from its own site, a boutique taking orders through social media and any brand working with influencers all fall within scope. Below we look at the rules not in legal language but through a single practical question: what record do I need to keep in order to comply?

This article is for information only and is not legal advice. For the full scope of your obligations, rely on the regulation text published in the Official Gazette and on ticaret.gov.tr, and consult your own legal adviser for your specific situation.

What changed, in short

The package is broad. These are the headings that directly concern a small business selling online:

• The baseline price in discounted sales. For goods, the price a discount is compared against must be the lowest price applied in the 10 days before the campaign began. A different measure applies to perishable goods.
• Consumer reviews. Only reviews based on verifiable consumer experience may be published. If a product is rated in several categories, all of those ratings must be visible in one accessible place.
• Complaint response time. The window given to sellers dropped from 72 hours to 48 hours.
• Targeted advertising. The concept is defined in the regulation for the first time: consumers must be told clearly on what criteria an ad was shown to them and how they can change those criteria. Targeted advertising to children based on personal data is banned.
• Influencer collaborations. Where any benefit is received, the commercial nature of the post must be stated clearly and distinguishably, using wording equivalent to "advertisement" or "promotion", with the advertiser identifiable.
• AI-generated content. Ads using digital characters indistinguishable from real people, or synthetic copies of a person, require disclosure.
• Environmental claims. Wording such as "eco-friendly" cannot be used without documents from authorised or accredited bodies.

Alongside these, the boundaries were also clarified for illegal betting and gambling ads, food supplement marketing and the use of academic titles.

The "last 10 days" rule is really a data problem

The clause looks simple on paper, but in practice it asks for something most sellers do not have ready: price history.

To show a struck-through "old price" you have to be able to demonstrate that the number was the lowest price in the previous 10 days. Price is no longer a single field answering "what is it now?"; it is a record of how it changed over time.

Three things follow from that:

1. Log every price change with its date. If updating a price in your admin panel overwrites the old value, you have no history. A simple price history table — product, price, effective from, who changed it — covers most of the need.

2. Calculate the baseline instead of typing it in. When you set up a campaign, pull the struck-through price from the system rather than picking it by marketing instinct: what was the lowest price in the last 10 days? It is a one-line query, but left to human memory in the rush of a campaign it will eventually be wrong.

3. Stay consistent across channels. If your own site, your marketplace store and your social ad show different prices, the problem is not limited to compliance; customer trust suffers too. The disconnected-data problem we described in ERP, CRM and e-commerce integration hurts exactly here.

If you want to design campaigns with margin in mind, pricing strategy and margin analysis is a good companion piece: the discount rate should be set by your remaining margin, not by a competitor.

Reviews and complaints: verifiability and 48 hours

Two separate headings, but both point at the same thing: is the review a customer sees genuine, and how quickly does the seller reply to it?

On verifiability, the critical question is whether you can show that the person who wrote the review actually bought the product. Reviews that do not match an order record, or whose origin is unclear, are now a problem. The fix is plain: tie the review form to an order number, and make sure every published review has an order behind it.

Rating display is clearer too. If you let customers rate a product on several dimensions — quality, delivery, price — all of them must be visible in one place. Highlighting the flattering score and burying the weak one deeper in the page is no longer a design choice.

Cutting the response window to 48 hours is an operations question, not a marketing one; two days does not survive a "I will look at it on Monday" habit. This trio is enough for most businesses:

• One inbox where complaint and review notifications land, rather than each platform's own alerts.
• A named owner and a response deadline for every record.
• A short pending list showing what is about to breach the deadline.

If your volume is high, the distinction we drew in AI and chatbots in customer service applies here: the machine drafts, a human decides to send.

Ad labels, targeted ads and AI content

The influencer rule is simple: if there is a benefit, there is an advertisement, and it must be stated openly. A benefit is not only money — a gifted product, a discount code or an invitation to an event counts too. A single clause in the contract closes most of the risk: the post must carry wording equivalent to "advertisement" or "promotion" and identify the advertiser, in the visible part of the content.

For targeted advertising, who you show an ad to and on what criteria now requires transparency. That makes this a good moment to revisit your personal-data obligations; the inventory logic in our data privacy compliance guide for SMEs applies here as well: what data are you collecting, on what basis, and where is it used?

AI-generated images and videos are no longer a grey area either. If an ad uses a digital character indistinguishable from a real person, or a synthetic copy of someone, that has to be disclosed. If AI is part of your production pipeline, a simple log of which asset was generated how will save you a lot of work later. To set expectations inside the team, the usage-policy outline in our AI literacy guide is a good starting point.

For environmental claims the rule fits in one sentence: if you do not have the document, do not write the claim. If you use wording like "eco-friendly", know which folder the supporting certificate sits in.

A checklist you can run this week

• Do you keep product price history, and can you query the last 10 days retrospectively?
• Is the struck-through price on your campaign screen typed in by hand, or calculated?
• How many of your published reviews match an order record?
• Do complaints land in a single place, and what is your average response time?
• Do your influencer contracts include a labelling clause?
• Is AI use in your ad creatives recorded anywhere?
• Is the documentation behind your environmental claims on file?

If the answer to most of these is "I do not know", the problem is measurement before compliance. As we noted in website analytics and why data quality matters, no process that goes unrecorded can be managed.

Compliance is less a cost than a chance to get organised

What all of these rules have in common is this: everything a seller claims should have a record behind it. Price history behind a price claim, an order behind a review, a certificate behind an environmental statement, a transparent criterion behind an ad.

The good news is that all of those records are data you want anyway. A seller who keeps price history is not just compliant; they can also see which discount actually sold. A seller who ties reviews to orders learns why a given product gets returned.

If you would like to reshape your systems around price history, review verification or complaint tracking, get in touch; you can also look through our services to see how we work.