How do people in Turkey pay online?
Turkish shoppers pay by card, and they expect instalments. E-commerce made up 32.8% of all card spending in 2025, about TL 6.71 trillion, and 57.8% of e-commerce card purchases were paid in instalments (taksit) rather than in one go, up from 55.5% a year earlier. A checkout that shows only a single-payment option loses baskets in electronics, travel, furniture and fashion, where instalments are the norm.
The market keeps growing quickly. The Ministry of Trade, which measures e-commerce through its own registry, put 2025 e-commerce volume at TL 4.567 trillion, up 52.2% on 2024 and about 19.5% of total trade, with 634,000 businesses selling online. Card data points the same way: the Interbank Card Center (BKM) counted TL 756.9 billion of internet card payments in April 2026 alone, up 39% on a year earlier.
Visa and Mastercard dominate issuing, with Troy, the domestic scheme run by BKM, on a growing share of debit and credit cards, especially those issued by state banks. BKM counted 462.0 million cards in April 2026, including 147.6 million credit cards, 216.0 million debit cards and 98.4 million prepaid cards. Bank-run loyalty programmes such as Bonus, World, Maximum, Axess and CardFinans shape which cards customers reach for and which instalment offers they expect to see.
Outside cards, bank transfers through the FAST instant payment system, the BKM Express wallet and e-money wallets cover smaller shares. The number of prepaid cards fell by 3% in the year to April 2026, so merchants should not rely on a single wallet or prepaid product for a material share of volume.
What rules shape online payments in Turkey?
Instalments are capped by category. The banking regulator BDDK sets the maximum number of credit card instalments per spending category, and banks can only offer taksit within those limits. A November 2025 summary of the limits lists, for example, 12 instalments for mobile phones up to TL 20,000 but 3 above that price, 9 for furniture and electrical appliances and 4 for most electronics, while food and groceries, telecoms, cosmetics, gift cards and air travel abroad cannot be paid in instalments. Check the current list with your acquirers, because the categories change by regulation.
Shoppers have 14 days to change their minds. Under the Regulation on Distance Contracts, consumers can withdraw from an online purchase within 14 days without giving a reason. Amendments published in the Official Gazette on 24 May 2025 (No. 32909) and in force since 1 January 2026 brought mobile phones, smartwatches, tablets and computers back within that right, and stopped sellers charging return shipping when the shopper uses the carrier named in the pre-contract information; if no carrier was named, the seller pays the full return cost. Online sellers and marketplaces also fall under the E-commerce Law No. 6563. An amendment published on 7 July 2022 (Official Gazette No. 31889) introduced obligations tiered by annual net transaction volume from 1 January 2023, and from 1 January 2025 the largest marketplaces need a licence from the Ministry of Trade.
Foreign digital sellers pay Turkish VAT and may owe digital services tax. Non-resident suppliers of electronic services to Turkish consumers use a special VAT registration for electronic service providers, with no registration threshold, a 20% rate and monthly returns due by the 26th of the following month. The separate digital services tax under Law No. 7194 fell from 7.5% to 5% on 1 January 2026 and is set to fall to 2.5% on 1 January 2027, under Presidential Decision No. 10767 of 25 December 2025. It applies only to providers with more than TRY 20 million of Turkish revenue and more than EUR 750 million of global revenue from in-scope services.
Payment providers are licensed and keep data in Turkey. Payment and e-money institutions operate under Law No. 6493, amended by Law No. 7192 with effect from 1 January 2020, and are supervised by the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye. Its regulation and communiqué of 1 December 2021 require these institutions to keep their primary and secondary systems and data backup centres in Turkey. Customer data sent abroad falls under the personal data law (KVKK), whose transfer rules were rewritten by Law No. 7499 in March 2024, with a by-law of 10 July 2024 setting out how standard contracts and other safeguards work.
How does Omno route payments in Turkey?
Omno treats Turkey as a multi-acquirer card market. You connect once and configure routing rules per card type, issuer and customer group:
- Card pay-ins can be routed by BIN, so each issuing bank’s cards go to the acquirer your rule sets for that issuer, with cascading to the next provider in the rule if one is unavailable or rejects the request.
- Instalment payments are passed through to providers that support taksit for that card programme, and eligibility rules keep instalment requests away from routes that only accept single payments.
- Troy cards are routed only to acquirers that accept the domestic scheme, so customers with state-bank cards are not declined at the first step.
- Webhooks report the final status of every payment, including 3-D Secure outcomes, which is the record your order system should trust.
Tokenization lets returning customers pay with a stored card, and card blocking rules let you stop known fraudulent cards before they reach an acquirer.
What should merchants plan for?
Plan for instalments. Show the instalment options your acquirers support for each card programme and product category, and test the flows with the major bank loyalty cards before launch. Instalment plans also change the cost of acceptance, so compare fees per route rather than per acquirer.
Plan for 3-D Secure on almost every transaction. Turkish issuers authenticate heavily, so routing must account for authentication success as well as authorisation success.
Plan for returns. With a 14-day right to withdraw now covering phones, tablets and computers, and sellers paying return shipping through the named carrier, refund flows and their costs belong in the launch plan.
Plan for currency volatility. TRY prices, refunds and settlements move quickly against hard currencies, and the routing-decision log in Omno shows which acquirer handled each payment so finance teams can reconcile TRY settlements and fees by route.