Turkey's Distance Sales Law and Returns

If you sell into Turkey from abroad, or run a Turkish storefront, the rulebook for returns is the Mesafeli Sozlesmeler Yonetmeligi, the Distance Contracts Regulation issued under Turkiye's Law No. 6502 on Consumer Protection. Its central grant will look familiar to anyone who knows the EU regime: a fourteen-day right of withdrawal, cayma hakki, that lets a consumer cancel a distance purchase without giving a reason and without penalty. The familiarity is not a coincidence, since the Turkish framework was modeled on the same European consumer-protection logic. But the details, the return deadlines, the refund clock, and who pays to ship the item back, carry their own Turkish specifics that a seller cannot infer from EU law alone.

This guide walks through the parts that actually shape a returns flow into the Turkish market: when the withdrawal clock starts, how long the consumer has to send the goods back, how fast you must refund, which products are carved out, and how the whole thing lines up against the EU rules you may already be running.

The right of withdrawal (cayma hakki)

The core right is a fourteen-day window in which the consumer can walk away from a distance contract for any reason or none. For physical goods the clock starts on the day the consumer, or a third party they nominated, takes delivery; where an order is fulfilled in several shipments, it runs from the day the last item arrives. For service contracts it starts on the day the contract is concluded. As in the EU, if you fail to properly inform the consumer of their withdrawal right in the pre-contract information, the window does not simply close on day fourteen; it extends, giving the customer far longer to change their mind. Correct disclosure through the required preliminary information form is the cheapest protection you have.

One point where Turkiye is more explicit than some readings of the EU rules is the consumer's own return deadline. After sending notice that they are withdrawing, the consumer is generally expected to send the goods back within about ten days. That gives you a defined operational window, notice, then a short return period, rather than an open-ended wait for the parcel to reappear.

The refund clock and who pays to ship it back

On the merchant side, once the consumer notifies you of a valid withdrawal, you are generally required to refund within fourteen days, returning all payments received through the same means the customer used. As in the EU, you can typically withhold the refund until the goods arrive back or the customer evidences that they have sent them, and stating that condition plainly in your policy is both a safeguard and a way to manage expectations so the refund does not feel late.

Return shipping follows a disclosure-and-designation logic. If you named the carrier the consumer should use for the return in your preliminary information form, the consumer can be expected to bear that return cost; if you did not designate a carrier, the cost falls on you as the seller. This is close to the EU principle that the customer only pays if properly informed, with the Turkish twist that the named-carrier designation is the mechanism. For how the personal data generated by all of this, IBANs for refunds, addresses, and reasons, must be handled under Turkish law, see our guide to GDPR and KVKK for returns data.

The exceptions that do not qualify for withdrawal

The withdrawal right is broad but not universal, and the exempt categories mirror the EU list closely. Flag them before purchase rather than arguing after, because an exemption you never disclosed is one you will struggle to rely on.

Turkiye's fourteen-day withdrawal right rhymes with the EU's, but the return deadlines, the refund clock, and the carrier designation are written in a Turkish accent.

How the Turkish regime compares to the EU

For a seller who already runs an EU-compliant flow, the good news is that the spine is the same: a fourteen-day, no-reason withdrawal right for distance sales, a fourteen-day refund obligation, a similar list of exemptions, and a disclosure-driven rule on return costs. The differences that bite are procedural. Turkiye centers the pre-contract obligation on a specific preliminary information form; it spells out the consumer's roughly ten-day return deadline more explicitly; and it ties who pays return shipping to whether you designated a carrier. Official guidance sits with the Turkish Ministry of Trade at ticaret.gov.tr, which is the authority to check rather than an EU source.

The practical upshot is that you can extend an EU flow to cover Turkiye, but you cannot assume the EU version is automatically compliant, any more than you can assume it covers the UK. If you sell across several of these markets, the cleaner architecture is one returns flow that classifies each return by its legal basis and applies the right jurisdiction's rules, a model laid out in our merchant field guide to return rights.

Building it into the flow

As with every distance-sales regime, the reliable pattern is to make the legal basis a routed decision rather than a manual one, so the withdrawal window, the return deadline, and the refund clock fire automatically. That is how ResReturn approaches it: change-of-mind returns run through a compliant withdrawal path, exemptions are flagged at the product level so a hygiene-sealed item does not silently enter a flow it is carved out of, and the refund is timed against the fourteen-day obligation. For sellers who also serve the EU, the same EU withdrawal button pattern maps cleanly onto the Turkish cayma hakki, because the underlying logic is shared even where the deadlines differ.

• The Turkish cayma hakki gives a 14-day, no-reason withdrawal right on distance sales, starting on delivery for goods.
• The consumer is generally expected to send the goods back within about 10 days of giving withdrawal notice.
• You must generally refund within 14 days of the withdrawal notice, using the customer's original payment method.
• Return shipping falls on the consumer only if you designated the return carrier in the preliminary information form; otherwise it falls on you.
• Exemptions such as custom, perishable, hygiene-sealed, and unsealed media closely track the EU list; disclose them before purchase.