The Turkish Competition Authority finds that an online marketplace’s algorithmic pricing recommendations approach a de facto price parity mechanism, but declines to open an investigation in light of the platform’s limited market power

1. Text of the case comment

This article examines the Turkish Competition Board’s (“Board”) TEMU Decision^[1] (“Decision”), in which the Board assessed, at the preliminary investigation stage, whether the pricing practices of Whaleco Technology Limited and Whaleco Turkey Teknoloji A.Ş. (together “TEMU”) on TEMU’s multi-category online marketplace violated Article 4 of Law No. 4054 on the Protection of Competition (“Law No. 4054”). The Board unanimously dismissed the complaint and declined to initiate a full-fledged investigation.

Notably, however, the Board considered that TEMU’s mechanism approaches, in its effects, a de facto broad most-favoured-customer (“MFC”) clause with the potential to restrict competition; that limb of the complaint failed on account of TEMU’s limited market power. The Decision consolidates the Board’s position on marketplace pricing mechanisms as resale price maintenance (“RPM”), on the MFC theory as applied to algorithmic tools and on the relevance of market structure, and is further notable for the fines imposed on TEMU for obstructing an on-site inspection and failing to provide information.

2. Background

TEMU, operated by Ireland-incorporated Whaleco Technology Limited through its wholly-owned Turkish subsidiary, began selling to consumers in Türkiye on 13 May 2024; domestic sellers joined the platform on 25 May 2025. Acting on a confidential complaint of 4 November 2025, the Board opened a preliminary investigation on 15 January 2026 into whether TEMU had infringed Article 4 by interfering with seller pricing.

The inquiry had a striking procedural interlude. The attempted on-site inspection of 21 January 2026 failed entirely. In that context, access to the premises could not be obtained, no organisational chart was procured and no TEMU employee attended. The Board found the inspection obstructed and fined TEMU five-thousandths of its annual gross revenues, while the failure to submit the requested revenue data in time attracted a further fine of one-thousandth plus a daily penalty of five ten-thousandths.

3. The complainant’s allegations

The complainant alleged that sellers’ prices are effectively determined by TEMU. Sellers must enter, inter alia, their prices and listing links on other platforms; entered prices are subject to TEMU’s approval against undisclosed criteria; and price changes deemed unreasonable are left pending, rejected outright, or punished through traffic restrictions. According to the complaint, this system, reinforced by TEMU’s algorithm, allegedly amounted to prohibited interference with sellers’ pricing freedom and produced price coordination and rigidity among sellers. Invoking the Board’s 2023 investigation into the automatic pricing tools of Amazon, Trendyol and Hepsiburada and the Bundeskartellamt’s October 2025 proceedings against Temu in Germany^[2], the complainant requested interim measures and behavioural measures.

4. The board’s assessment

4.1 Relevant market

Consistent with its precedents^[3], the Board defined the relevant market as the multi-category e-marketplace market in Türkiye, notably declining to segment marketplaces operating through domestic sellers from those, like TEMU, operating predominantly through foreign sellers, given the substitutability indicated by market responses and the ease of switching between the two models.

4.2 Resale price maintenance

Sellers on TEMU do not enter a final sale price. They enter a “base price” representing the amount they expect to receive per sale, and TEMU’s formula generates the consumer-facing “Estimated Retail Sale Price” by adding its category-based service fee and applicable taxes.

The Board found that the TEMU-seller relationship is not a classic supplier-reseller relationship, since TEMU does not supply the listed products and sellers sell in their own name and on their own account. Even assuming such a relationship, the Board found that TEMU’s “suggested base price” invariably fell below the price already set by the seller and the mechanism pushed prices down rather than establishing a price floor. The Board further found that sellers could and did contest the suggestions, whose dynamic nature worked against fixed or minimum prices, and the seller agreements contain no provision directing sellers towards a minimum or fixed price. The Board therefore found that the conduct did not constitute RPM.

4.3 De facto most-favoured–customer clause

The Decision’s centre of gravity is its MFC analysis, and the Board set out the theory at length. An MFC (or price parity) clause obliges a seller to grant the beneficiary terms no less favourable than those granted to others; in the platform economy, it concerns the prices sellers offer through rival channels. The Board acknowledged the ambivalent economics of such clauses, noting efficiencies through the protection of platform investment against free-riding and reduced transaction costs, but equally softened price competition, price rigidity, facilitated collusion and, particularly in the “broad” form extending to rival platforms, foreclosure and entry barriers, risks that compound with market coverage. Critically, the Board recognized that parity need not be contractual. Surveying the Nustay/Booking complaint^[4], the US Amazon Buy Box litigation^[5] and the Bundeskartellamt’s decision of 5 February 2026 fining Amazon some EUR 59 million for price-control mechanisms suppressing the visibility of overpriced offers^[6], it accepted that platforms may secure parity de facto, through algorithms and ranking or visibility adjustments.

The Board noted that no MFC clause appears in TEMU’s seller contracts. The question was therefore whether TEMU’s practice amounted to such a mechanism in fact. The practice operates as follows: where TEMU’s algorithm assesses a listing as priced above the “suggested base price”, the seller is shown a “new product acceleration” notice for newly listed products or a “traffic acceleration” notice for products already on sale, each displaying the suggested price, which the seller can adopt with a single click or, alternatively, satisfy by enrolling the product in a discount campaign. According to the sellers, products whose prices remain above the suggestion are not delisted, but their visibility on the platform is pushed back, a sanction that sellers reported could reduce a product’s traffic to negligible levels. The mechanism was not confined to the seller interface. WhatsApp and e-mail correspondence obtained from sellers showed TEMU personnel contacting them directly, including for products under paid advertising, to ask whether the system’s suggested price could be accepted so that traffic would be restored.

TEMU objected that these notices are “traffic acceleration opportunities” rather than penalties, and that a product’s traffic is shaped by market dynamics, based on quality, delivery, consumer ratings and price competitiveness, rather than manipulated by TEMU. The Board was unpersuaded by the distinction put forward by TEMU and found that whether the mechanism is framed as a restriction for non-compliance or an acceleration for compliance, both variants produce similar results, amounting in either case to a penalty or reward mechanism that secures sellers’ alignment with the suggested price.

The Board identified one distinction from the surveyed precedents. In that context, the Board highlighted that the suggested price is not directly indexed to the same seller’s price on a specific rival platform, but derives from a broader analysis of publicly available market data spanning the same and similar products, quality and performance factors, to which the optional “reference link” field (listings of the same or similar products submitted by sellers) contributes. It nonetheless considered that a mechanism aimed at ensuring that the lowest prices are found on TEMU’s platform approaches, in its effects, a de facto broad MFC clause, with the potential to weaken sellers’ motivation to offer lower or differentiated prices on competing platforms, to dampen inter-platform price competition and to raise rivals’ costs and barriers to entry.

4.4 Market power assessment

What spared TEMU was market structure, from which MFC-type practices cannot be assessed in isolation. Having entered the Turkish market only in 2024, TEMU ranks fifth, trailing Trendyol, Hepsiburada, Amazon and N11, and its shares by transaction volume, transaction count and active consumers all remain well below the 30% threshold of the Block Exemption Communiqué on Vertical Agreements No. 2002/2. As TEMU is not indispensable to sellers, who retain strong alternatives, the practices were found incapable of producing a market-level anticompetitive effect, and the interim measures request was rejected, no infringement having been established.

5. Conclusion

The Board unanimously dismissed the complaint and declined to initiate a full-fledged investigation. The Decision draws a clear line between downward pricing pressure and RPM. Where a recommendation system pushes prices lower rather than establishing a floor and the platform-seller relationship is not a classic supplier-reseller structure, the RPM prohibition is not engaged.

More consequential is the treatment of the de facto MFC theory. By engaging with whether a traffic allocation mechanism can approximate a broad MFC clause in its effects, the Board has articulated a doctrinal position extending well beyond this case; platforms with stronger positions should take no comfort from the outcome. The dismissal turned on TEMU’s limited market share, not on any finding that the mechanism is inherently benign. Finally, the full procedural penalties applied at this early stage confirm that procedural obligations carry consequences regardless of the substantive outcome.

[1]Decision of the Board dated 26.02.2026 and numbered 26-07/197-71.

[2]Bundeskartellamt, press release of 8 October 2025.

[3]Decision of the Board dated 27.02.2023 and numbered 23-11/177-54 (Trendyol).

[4]Nustay’s 2019 complaint against Booking.com and Expedia before the European Commission.

[5]California v. Amazon (2022); FTC v. Amazon (W.D. Wash., 2023).

[6]Bundeskartellamt, decision of 5 February 2026.

Originally published in Concurrences