Guideline on Advertisements with Price Information, Sale Advertisements and Commercial Practices (“Guideline”) has been published, which has been prepared based on Law on Consumer Protection numbered 6502 and the Regulation on Commercial Advertising and Unfair Commercial Practices (“Regulation”),and accepted as the principle decision numbered 2022/1 given during the meeting of the Advertisements Board dated 12 April 2022 and numbered 320.
Guideline has been published and announced by the Ministry of Commerce on the date of 15 April 2022.
The Guideline states that it is aimed to guide sellers, providers and intermediary service providers together with advertisers, advertising agencies and media organizations and to popularize the practice of honest advertising.
The main noted related to main arrangements within the scope of the Guideline are as follows:
- In the definitions section of the Guideline, definitions for the concepts of provider, intermediary service provider, seller, discount sales, recommended selling price and perishable goods have been provided.
- The regulations in the Guideline are generally handled in three group, namely, basic principles, advertisements containing price information and discount sales advertisements.
- Limitation of the usage of phrases, such as “free”, which are frequently encountered in practice, has been regulated, and it has been stated that terms such as “free”, “free of charge” can only be used in cases where any payment is not made by the consumers for the relevant goods/services, other than delivery.
- If there is any statement in the advertisements that a discount is made, the good/service subject to discounted sale and how much discount is applied should be clearly stated, and that the advertisements should not contain any misleading images or expressions before the consumers.
- The price before the sale, the start and end dates of the discounted sale must be clearly stated in the discounted sale advertisements and that the price to be taken into account shall be the lowest price within 30 days. It has been stated that the sales to be made or discounts to be applied in different e-commerce platforms or channels shall not meet the previous price criteria for each other.
- In case of the using of phrases such as “up to” in advertisements for discount sales campaigns, they should be legible size.
Please see this link for the full text of the Guideline published by the Commercial Ministry on 15 April 2022 (only available in Turkish).
