Two regimes, one site
If you sell to Türkiye and the EU from the same storefront, you are meeting two data protection regimes at once: KVKK + the Cookie Guideline, and GDPR + ePrivacy (in Germany, TDDDG §25). The good news: the rules largely point in the same direction — inform, obtain consent, do not load without consent. The bad news: a setup that “gets by” under one of the two regimes can produce a violation under the other.
Practical guidance
Quick test: open your site in a private window and, without clicking anything, check the cookies in the developer tools. If entries such as _ga or _fbp have been set, your consent setup is in violation.
Let’s build your consent layer correctly
We prepare the cookie inventory, the banner setup, the information notice and the policy set in a single project — in three languages: TR/DE/EN.
Information notice: the obligation to inform
Under KVKK Art. 10, the identity of the data controller, the purposes of processing, the legal ground, the recipients, the method of collection and the data subject’s rights must be presented — alongside forms and sign-up flows, in a layered and accessible form. The practical standard in e-commerce is the trio of a general notice + a short notice under each form + a cookie policy. On the GDPR side, Art. 13 serves the same function; a single text can satisfy both regimes.
Cookie banner: the consent obligation
Everything other than strictly necessary cookies (session, cart, security) — analytics, marketing, personalisation — is subject to prior consent. Valid consent has three conditions: prior (before loading), freely given (rejecting is equally easy) and informed (per purpose and per tool). The formula “by using this site you are deemed to have accepted” is invalid under both regimes.
How does it look from the outside?
Consent violations can be scanned technically: _ga/_fbp cookies set before the banner appears, designs without a reject button, dark-pattern banners (hiding the reject option). That is why the cookie setup is the second item in our outside-in scan and is raised increasingly often in German cease-and-desist practice.
A single-layer dual-compliance setup
The architecture we recommend: (1) a tool-based cookie inventory; (2) consent management split into categories (necessary/analytics/marketing) with text and language variants by geography; (3) retention of consent records; (4) a consistent trio of information notice + cookie policy + privacy policy; (5) an inventory refresh every three months. This setup also closes step 4 of the GDPR roadmap.
Five common mistakes
(1) There is a banner, but the cookies load first; (2) the reject button is hidden in the second layer; (3) the information notice appears only on the homepage; (4) no consent records are kept — the burden of proof is forgotten; (5) an English template text is shown to TR traffic. The common result of all five: compliance on paper, violation in practice.
Conclusion
The cookie and notice layer is the shop window of data compliance: if it is incomplete, the inside is assumed to be incomplete too. A single, correctly built layer satisfies KVKK, GDPR and marketplace reviews at the same time. For the setup, see our KVKK/GDPR programme; for the transfer dimension, see our KVKK legislation record.
