A cosmetics store in Bursa ships around eleven hundred parcels a month. On a Tuesday in March it adds an aerosol dry shampoo to the catalog. It sells well. Forty of them go out over the following fortnight, packed properly, labeled properly, accepted at the branch without a word.
On the ninth day, six of those parcels stop moving. The tracking history shows them arriving at a transfer facility and then nothing. Nobody at the store notices, because nothing failed: no exception code, no refused delivery, no damage report. The first signal is a customer message on day eleven asking why the tracking has not updated since last week.
The parcels were pulled at the transfer facility because aerosols are pressurised and flammable, and the carrier's published standards say so. The counter that accepted them was never going to catch it — counters do not open boxes. By the time anyone knew, the store had promised six delivery dates it could not keep, and the parcels came back at the store's expense, with storage charged on top.
Nothing in that story is a shipping mistake in the usual sense. The addresses were right, the packaging was right, the labels were right. What was wrong was a decision made weeks earlier, in a different part of the business, by somebody adding a product to a catalog without knowing that the product had just narrowed the list of carriers the store could use.
This guide is about restricted and prohibited shipments as an operational constraint rather than a legal topic. It sits alongside three posts that cover the neighbouring problems: shipping labels is about the fields on the label being carrier instructions, packaging optimization is about how the box is built, and lost and damaged parcels is about recovering money once something has gone wrong. Every carrier detail below is taken from published standards at the time of writing; carriers update them quietly, so confirm the current wording with your own account manager before you act on it.
There Is No National List, and the Carriers Disagree
The first thing to understand is that the document most people go looking for does not exist. There is no single Turkish list of things you cannot put in a parcel. What exists is a separate published standard from each carrier, and the standards overlap in the middle and diverge at the edges.
The middle is uncontroversial. No carrier in Turkey will move weapons, narcotics, cash and precious metals, human remains, or live animals. If that were the whole of it, this would not be worth a guide.
The edges are where the money is. Yurtiçi Kargo's published list of prohibited shipments runs to sixteen categories and includes, alongside the obvious ones, detergent, machine oil, certain paints, eggs, garlic and onions — the last two because their smell transfers to other shipments in the same vehicle. It also excludes tobacco products and electronic cigarettes outright, and any single piece over 100 kg or longer than 2.5 m. Sürat Kargo's published standards name industrial gas cylinders, fire extinguishers, vehicle parts containing liquid, and batteries, dry or liquid. MNG Kargo, now trading as DHL eCommerce, names flammable, toxic, explosive and foul-smelling liquids and gases, together with perishable foods, meat, fish, produce, liquid oils and raw hides.
Read those three together and the useful pattern appears. These are not lists of dangerous goods. They are lists of ordinary retail products — a bottle of detergent, a car care kit, a jar of olive oil, a crate of eggs, a box of vape liquid — and each carrier drew the line in a slightly different place.
Which means the practical question is not "what is banned in Turkey." It is: which of the products I already sell is banned at the carrier I already use. Almost nobody has answered that question, because answering it requires putting the catalog and the carrier standards on the same page, and nothing in either system ever asks you to.
Three Tiers, Not Two
The mental model that causes trouble is binary: allowed or banned. Carriers publish three tiers, and the middle one is where most of an ordinary catalog lands.
Prohibited outright
The carrier will not take it under any packaging, any declared value, any agreement. There is no version of this where a conversation with your sales representative changes the answer, and there is no version where paying more helps. If a product you sell is on this list for the carrier you use, you have exactly two options: a different carrier, or not selling it online.
Carried only under conditions
This is the tier that matters, because the condition is almost always something you control. Yurtiçi's standards accept non-flammable, non-caustic, non-explosive, non-toxic and non-foul-smelling liquids in sturdy plastic, steel or aluminium containers. Batteries are accepted when they are the automotive type, drained, in original packaging with terminal protection marked — and the same paragraph states plainly that filled liquid batteries, lithium and ion types, and any used battery are prohibited. Dismantled furniture is accepted when no piece exceeds 20 kg, the longest dimension stays under 150 cm, and the total on one invoice stays under 50 kg.
Notice the shape of those. They are not refusals. They are specifications — and a specification is something you can either meet on every parcel or fail on the one parcel that gets checked. The gap between "we usually do that" and "we always do that" is the entire risk.
Accepted, but outside the standard
The third tier is the quietest and the one that costs money later. Some shipments are carried, but on different terms: the carrier flags them as non-standard, and the practical effect is on liability rather than acceptance. Yurtiçi's conditional list is explicit about fragile goods — ceramics, porcelain, glassware, mirrors, marble, furniture, chandeliers — being carried against a liability document signed by both parties when the packaging is judged inadequate. Its standards also state that temperature-sensitive goods travel under ordinary conditions with no climate protection guaranteed.
Sign that document, or ship that product, and you have not been refused. You have been told in advance that if it arrives broken, the answer to your claim is already written. That changes the economics of selling mirrors online, and it should be a decision somebody makes deliberately rather than one a packer discovers at a counter.
The Restricted Items in an Ordinary Catalog
Here is the list that actually matters to a store with 50 to 5,000 parcels a month. None of these are exotic.
Liquids, and the word "flammable"
Liquids as a class are usually fine: sealed, sturdy container, not flammable, not caustic, not foul-smelling. The word that flips a liquid from routine to restricted is flammable, and it catches more of a cosmetics or homeware catalog than people expect — alcohol-based perfume and cologne, nail polish and remover, aerosols of every kind, solvent-based cleaners, lighter fluid, some adhesives, some paints.
Cooking oil is the other trap, and for a different reason. It is not dangerous; it leaks, and a leak contaminates every other parcel in the same cage. That is why liquid oils appear on prohibited lists next to genuinely hazardous material. The carrier is not making a safety judgment, it is making a housekeeping one.
Batteries and anything with one inside
Batteries deserve their own line because the restriction rarely applies to a product you think of as a battery. A power bank is a battery. So is a cordless vacuum, a ride-on toy, a hobby drone, a spare laptop pack, and a returned phone. Yurtiçi's standards prohibit lithium and ion types and every used battery, while allowing drained automotive types in original packaging; Sürat's list names batteries without qualification.
The tightest case is the one nobody plans for: a customer return containing a device with a battery, sent back through a route you did not choose and did not brief. The return leg of your operation ships the same restricted goods as the outbound leg, from a sender who has never read a carrier standard in their life.
Glass, mirrors, and the document you sign instead of cover
Fragile goods are usually carried — with the liability shifted. If mirrors, glassware or ceramics are a meaningful part of your catalog, the packaging decision and the carrier decision stop being separate: the packaging is what determines whether you are asked to sign away the claim. Our packaging optimization guide is about cutting desi, but the same choices do double duty here.
Size and weight are restrictions too
A restriction does not have to be about the contents. Yurtiçi will not carry a single piece over 100 kg or longer than 2.5 m; MNG's conditional list caps single pieces at 100 kg in crates or cages. If you sell furniture, sports equipment, rugs, or anything with one long dimension, your carrier list is already shorter than you think — and the item probably also costs more than you think, for the desi reasons rather than the weight ones.
The Parcel Is Not Stopped at the Counter
This is the part that makes restricted goods different from every other shipping failure, and it is the reason stores get caught repeatedly by the same product.
Acceptance is not approval. A branch counter takes a sealed box from a courier route or a drop-off; it weighs it, scans it, and moves it. It does not open it. The employee at the counter is not performing a compliance check and was never asked to. So the first forty parcels go through, which the store reads — reasonably — as evidence that the product is fine.
Discovery happens later and further in: at a transfer facility, on a sorting line, during a security check, or when something leaks and somebody goes looking for the source. By then three things are true that were not true at the counter. The customer has a tracking link. You have promised a delivery date. And the parcel is a long way from you.
What happens next is where the cost sits. The shipment has to come back, and a returned or unclaimed parcel is not free: Yurtiçi's published transport rules say a shipment held at the destination branch and not collected within three days returns to the sender with transport and storage fees charged. You pay the outbound leg you already paid, the return leg, and storage, on a sale you are about to refund.
Then there is the part that does not show up on any invoice. The customer has been waiting with no explanation, and there is no good version of the explanation. "Your parcel is delayed" is a lie you will have to maintain. "We shipped something our carrier does not carry" is the truth, and it is worse. Our guide to handling delivery complaints covers the conversation, but the honest summary is that this is the one delivery failure where the customer's natural conclusion — that you did not know what you were doing — happens to be correct.
The Transport Mode You Never Chose
Here is the mechanic that explains why a product can be fine for months and then suddenly is not.
You choose a carrier and a service. You do not choose how the parcel physically travels between two cities, and that choice is not fixed. Carriers move long lanes by road or by air depending on distance, volume, the day, and what they have promised. A parcel from Istanbul to a far eastern province may go by road in a quiet week and by air in a busy one.
That matters because the air restrictions are a different and stricter rulebook, and it is not the carrier's rulebook. Turkish civil aviation law — Law no. 2920, article 93 — does not permit the carriage by air of weapons, ammunition, explosives, flammable substances, corrosive and destructive materials, toxic gases, nuclear fuel and radioactive material, or any solid, liquid or gaseous substance determined to be dangerous to people, the environment or property. PTT has stated that it does not prohibit perfume as such, but that perfume is prohibited in air transport because it is flammable.
Read that as an operational fact rather than a legal one. The same product, the same carrier, the same service, two different lanes, two different answers. If your restricted-item thinking only asks "does my carrier accept this," it will be right most of the time and wrong in the specific way that produces a stopped parcel with no explanation attached.
The practical consequence is simple enough: for any product that is flammable, pressurised or battery-powered, the question to ask the carrier is not "do you carry this" but "do you carry this on every lane I ship to, including the ones you fly."
Declaring It Wrong Does Not Move the Risk. It Moves It to You.
Somewhere in every operation that ships a borderline product, somebody eventually suggests describing it differently on the paperwork. Cologne becomes "cosmetic." A power bank becomes "electronic accessory." Cleaning fluid becomes "household goods."
It sometimes works, in the narrow sense that the parcel is accepted. What it actually does is transfer the entire risk onto you, in three ways.
Your claim stops existing. A carrier's liability runs against what the shipment was declared to be. A claim on a parcel whose declared contents do not match its actual contents is the easiest claim any carrier will ever decline, and the declaration you made is the evidence. Everything in our lost and damaged parcels guide about documenting a claim assumes the declaration was honest; without that, there is nothing to document.
Your insurance follows the declaration, not the goods. A declared value on a misdescribed shipment buys you less than nothing — you paid for cover against an event it does not apply to.
In the safety categories, it is not only a commercial problem. Flammable and pressurised goods are restricted because of what they do in a vehicle or an aircraft, not because the carrier is being difficult, and that exposure does not disappear because a label says something else.
The label is a set of instructions to the carrier, as we argued at length in the shipping label guide. The declared contents field is one of those instructions. A wrong one is not a small administrative fib; it is the instruction that decides who pays when the parcel does not arrive.
What the Carrier Asks You For
If you sell in any of these categories, three documents will come up. Knowing them in advance turns a surprise into paperwork.
The MSDS. For anything that falls under ADR — the dangerous-goods framework — carriers decide acceptance by asking for the material safety data sheet and evaluating it. Yurtiçi's standards say exactly this: whether ADR-scope cargo can be carried, and under what conditions, is decided after the MSDS form requested from the customer is evaluated. Your supplier or manufacturer has this document. Get it once, at listing time, and the conversation with a carrier takes a day instead of a fortnight.
The liability document for fragile goods. Where packaging is judged inadequate for ceramics, glass, mirrors, marble or similar, carriage proceeds against a document signed by both parties. Decide in advance whether you are willing to sign it, per product category, rather than at the counter with a courier waiting.
Declared value. Where it is available, declaring value is how you buy a claim worth filing on goods the standard liability would barely cover. It is not a way to make a restricted item acceptable — it changes the compensation, not the admissibility — and it is worth understanding before you need it.
Write the Constraint Down Once: The Carrier Matrix
Everything above becomes manageable the moment it stops living in one experienced person's memory. The artefact is small and boring, which is why it usually does not get built.
Start from the products, not from the carriers
Take your catalog and group it into shipping-relevant classes, not commercial ones. A store with 900 SKUs usually has fewer than fifteen: standard dry goods, sealed liquids, flammable liquids and aerosols, powered devices with batteries, fragile, perishable, oversized, high-value, and so on. Most of the catalog lands in the first class and needs no thought ever again.
Then, for each class, write one line per carrier: carried / carried under conditions / not carried, with the condition spelled out and a date. Four carriers and twelve classes is a table you can build in an afternoon from published standards plus three phone calls, and it is the single highest-leverage hour of work in this whole guide.
Then decide what the rule does
A matrix nobody reads is worth nothing. The point is to turn each line into something that happens automatically at the moment a parcel is created.
There are only three useful outcomes. Route it: this class always goes to the carrier that carries it, never to the default. Flag it: this class is carried under a condition, so it goes to a packing step that checks the condition before the label is printed. Block it: this class cannot ship on any of your carriers, which is a catalog decision and needs to be made by whoever owns the catalog, not discovered by whoever packs the box.
Rule-based carrier assignment is standard in any shipping platform — our automation guide covers the general mechanics, and the multi-carrier strategy guide covers why you need a second carrier in the first place. The point here is narrower and more important: a restriction is a hard routing rule. It is not an optimization, and it should never lose an argument to a cheaper rate.
The Number Almost Nobody Has
Ask a store how many parcels it lost last year to a restricted-goods stop and you will get a shrug, then an anecdote. That is not carelessness. There is genuinely no field for it: the parcel came back, somebody refunded the order, and the cost landed in the same undifferentiated bucket as every other return.
So it is worth saying plainly that the first problem is not the restriction, it is the absence of a count. You cannot argue for a second carrier, a packaging change or a delisting on the strength of a feeling.
The number is recoverable, and one afternoon is enough. Pull the last six months of shipments that came back to you without being delivered and without a customer request. Read the reason on each one. Group them. The categories you get are usually: bad address, customer unreachable, customer refused, and a residual pile with no clean reason attached — and that residual pile, on inspection, is where the restricted-goods stops are hiding, because no system had a label for them.
Once you have the count, the arithmetic is easy and unusually clear-cut. Each one of those parcels cost you the outbound leg, the return leg, storage, the refund, the support conversation, and a real chance of losing the customer: published surveys put the share of shoppers who will not buy again after a bad delivery anywhere from 40% to over 80%, and while the estimates vary wildly, none of them are small. Against that, the carrier matrix takes an afternoon. Very few decisions in shipping are this lopsided.
While you are there, the same six months of data answer a second question worth asking: which carrier produced them. Carriers do not enforce their own standards with equal enthusiasm on every lane, and the pattern is worth knowing before you route a whole product class to one of them.
Why This Gets Worse in November
Three things change at once in the run-up to peak, and all three point the same way.
Volume changes what gets inspected. More parcels, more transfer scans, more security checks, more chances that the one box with an aerosol in it goes through a line that catches it.
Lanes change. Carriers protect their transit-time promises during the season, and protecting transit times on long lanes tends to mean flying more of them. The restriction set that applies to your parcels is therefore at its strictest in exactly the weeks when a stopped parcel costs the most.
The people change. Peak staffing means people packing boxes who were not there in September. Every restriction that lives as tribal knowledge — "we don't send the spray ones with that carrier" — stops being enforced on the day the person who knew it is on a different shift.
That is the argument for doing this now rather than in November. Our peak season preparation guide makes the general case that the last safe moment to change anything is about thirty days out, because you need live volume to trust a change. A carrier matrix is the cheapest thing on that list: it is a document and a handful of rules, it requires no new agreement, and unlike most peak preparation it makes the operation simpler rather than more complicated.
What Not to Do
Do not treat one accepted parcel as a policy. Acceptance at a counter is evidence of nothing except that the box was closed. Forty accepted parcels are evidence that forty boxes were closed.
Do not let a restriction rule lose to a cheaper rate. Rate comparison is the right default for almost every parcel and the wrong default for this handful. A restricted class needs a hard assignment that the cheapest-rate logic cannot override.
Do not fix it by misdeclaring. It works until the day it matters, and the day it matters is the day you needed the claim.
Do not delist a product before checking the second carrier. The most common overreaction to a stopped parcel is pulling the product. Often the product is fine and the carrier was wrong for it — which is a routing decision, not a catalog decision.
Do not rely on the carrier to tell you when the rules change. Published standards get updated quietly. Put a calendar reminder to re-read the standards of your carriers twice a year, and attach the date to every line of the matrix so you can see what has gone stale.
Do not forget the return leg. Everything above applies to parcels coming back to you, sent by customers who have read nothing and will declare nothing.
Where Shipink Fits
Shipink is a shipping platform, not a compliance tool, so it is worth being precise about which half of this problem it solves.
It does not read your product descriptions and it does not know that a given SKU is an aerosol. No shipping platform does. The carrier standards are the carrier's, the MSDS is your supplier's, and the decision about what to sell is yours.
What it changes is everything downstream of that decision:
- More than one carrier on the same screen. The whole argument above collapses if you only have one carrier, because then a restriction is a delisting. Shipink connects 15+ carriers — including Aras, Yurtiçi, PTT, Sürat, DHL eCommerce, HepsiJET, Kolay Gelsin, UPS and FedEx — on your own negotiated agreements, Shipink's ready agreements, or a mix, so a restricted class has somewhere to go.
- Rules that assign the carrier instead of a person choosing. Automation rules turn the matrix into behavior: a class of orders is assigned to the carrier that carries it, every time, including on the day the person who knows is not in. Automation rules are available on the Pro and Enterprise plans.
- One order list across every sales channel. The rule applies the same way whether the order came from your own store, from a marketplace, or from a second storefront — which matters, because restricted products tend to be sold on more than one channel and the tribal knowledge only ever lives on one of them.
- Per-carrier reporting. Delivery time, success rate, cost and desi by carrier is where the count from the section above becomes a standing number rather than an afternoon's archaeology.
- A branded tracking page and automatic notifications, so that when something does stop, the customer hears it from you rather than discovering silence. That is available on every plan, with WhatsApp and SMS on Pro and above.
The honest limits: Shipink cannot make a carrier accept a shipment it has said it will not carry, cannot obtain an MSDS for you, and cannot tell you whether a specific parcel will travel by road or by air on a given day. Those stay with the carrier. What it can do is make sure that once you know the answer, it is applied to every parcel automatically instead of being remembered.
The Restricted Items Checklist
Find out what you are actually shipping
- List every product class in your catalog that involves liquid, pressure, batteries, glass, food, or an unusual size
- Pull the last six months of parcels that came back without being delivered and without a customer request
- Read the reason on each one and separate the residual pile with no clean reason attached
- Put a number on what those parcels cost, including both legs, storage and the refund
Read the standards you are already bound by
- Download the published shipment standards of every carrier you use, not just the main one
- Mark which of your product classes are prohibited, which are conditional, and what the condition is
- Confirm the borderline cases in writing with your carrier account manager, per product
- Ask specifically whether the answer changes on lanes the carrier flies
- Note the date you checked, next to every line
Build the matrix and make it act
- Write one line per product class per carrier: carried / conditional / not carried
- Assign each conditional class to a packing step that verifies the condition before the label prints
- Assign each restricted class to the carrier that carries it, as a hard rule that a cheaper rate cannot override
- Escalate any class no carrier will take to whoever owns the catalog, as a listing decision
- Collect the MSDS for every ADR-scope product at listing time, before you need it
Keep it alive
- Brief the rule set to everyone who packs, including seasonal staff, before peak
- Apply the same rules to return shipments, not just outbound
- Re-read the carrier standards twice a year and update the dates
- Review the count of restricted-goods stops monthly alongside your other delivery exceptions
Decide This Before a Customer Decides It for You
The uncomfortable thing about restricted goods is that the decision gets made either way. Either you make it deliberately, in an afternoon, with the published standards open in front of you — or it gets made for you at a transfer facility, on a parcel that already has a customer waiting at the other end of it.
Almost every other shipping problem in this blog is a matter of degree: dispatch time can be a little faster, rates a little cheaper, a promise a little more accurate. This one is binary. The carrier either moves the parcel or it does not, and the difference between those two outcomes is decided before the order ever arrives.
If you want the carrier choice to follow a rule instead of a memory, Shipink puts 15+ carriers, automatic rate comparison, rule-based carrier assignment and per-carrier reporting on one screen — with a free plan to start on and pricing that scales with the volume you actually ship.
