Shipping Regulations and Electronic Notifications in Türkiye
In Turkey, shipping is an area where two separate legal frameworks intersect: tax legislation (documentation requirements) and transportation legislation (transportation activity). Both impose electronic notification obligations.
1. e-Delivery Note
An e-delivery note is the electronic equivalent of a paper delivery note and has the same legal validity as the paper document. An important distinction: the e-delivery note digitizes the delivery note ; the transport document, which shows which vehicle and driver carried out the shipment, is a separate document.
The scope for 2026 is as follows: Taxpayers registered with the e-Invoice system and whose gross sales revenue is 10 million TL or more in the 2024 or 2025 accounting periods will be included in the e-Delivery Note system as of July 1, 2026. Additionally, there are sectors included without a turnover requirement: license holders under the special consumption tax lists, sugar manufacturers, iron and steel producers, mining license holders, and traders and commission agents engaged in vegetable and fruit trade. For taxpayers within the scope of the Rebar Tracking System, the threshold has been reduced to 1 million TL.
Taxpayers included in the system for the first time can issue paper delivery notes until the last day of the month in which they are included; after this period, except in exceptional circumstances, the possibility of issuing paper delivery notes ceases.
What is required from a systemic perspective?
Automatic generation of e-delivery note from shipment data.
Checking if the recipient is registered in the system and directing them accordingly.
Tracking acceptance, rejection, and return responses.
QR code generation and traceability in road inspections.
Relocating additional space required by sectoral monitoring systems.
Electronic storage for the legally mandated period
Tracking the match between invoices and delivery notes and monitoring deadlines.
Continuing with paper delivery notes means that a taxpayer within the scope risks being considered as having "never issued a delivery note" and incurs administrative penalties per document.
2. Transportation Electronic Tracking and Monitoring System (U-ETDS)
According to the Road Transport Law and Road Transport Regulation, holders of authorization certificates for freight transport are required to report transport information electronically. This notification must include sender and recipient information, transport date, vehicle license plate number, type and weight of goods transported, and loading and unloading location, date, and time. The notification must be submitted to the system no later than six hours after the vehicle's departure time. Authorization certificate holders who fail to fulfill this notification obligation receive a warning; sanctions are also applied if the submitted information is found to be incorrect.
From a system perspective, this means that since the shipment data is already in the system, manually re-entering the notification is both unnecessary workload and a source of errors. The correct approach is for the notification to be automatically transmitted from the shipment record via web service.
3. Other obligations
e-Invoice and e-Archive Invoice: The electronic issuance of invoices, like e-Delivery Notes, is regulated by separate circulars, thresholds, and penalty regimes. Being subject to one does not automatically mean being subject to the other.
Dangerous goods transportation: Packaging, labeling, vehicle equipment, driver's license, transport documents, and safety consultant obligations.
Authorization documents: Documents required according to the type of transportation activity and monitoring their validity.
Packaging and waste reporting: Reporting of the quantity of packaging placed on the market; data source is shipment records.
Sectoral monitoring systems: Product-based tracking requirements for specific product groups and their documentation.
Common conclusion: In Turkey, shipments are now so heavily reliant on electronic notifications that they can no longer be handled on paper. While it's possible to manually fulfill each of these obligations on a separate portal, it's not sustainable. The correct approach is to derive all notifications from a single shipment record .