Handling customer complaints in your webshop: repair, compensation or acknowledgement

A customer who complains tells you what went wrong. What they want back is almost never in the message. That's where complaint handling usually slips. The team reads the complaint, picks a standard reply and sends it within the agreed time. And still the customer comes back, angrier than before.

The reply was quick and polite. It was just the wrong kind of answer. A customer who needs their order by Saturday doesn't want a discount code. A customer who was transferred three times doesn't want a new shipment. They want someone to admit that this wasn't okay.

Almost every complaint asks for one of three things. Sometimes a combination, but one always weighs heavier.

1. Repair. The product, the delivery or the service still has to come right. A replacement, a repair, a new shipment. You recognise it in sentences like "I need it by Saturday" or "when do I get a new one?"
2. Compensation. The customer had damage, costs or trouble and wants something in return. Money back, part of the price, the shipping costs. You recognise it by amounts and by phrases like "I did pay for this".
3. Acknowledgement. The customer wants someone to see what happened and say it shouldn't have gone that way. You recognise it by a long account of everything that came before, and by phrases like "this is the third time".

These are the three asks. A complaint is only handled well when the reply answers the same ask the customer made.

The three aren't interchangeable. You notice it in the reaction that follows.

Compensation where repair was asked for. A present for a birthday five days away arrives broken. A €15 voucher doesn't help. The customer reads: we're buying you off, and your present isn't coming.

Acknowledgement where compensation was asked for. An elaborate apology for a double charge, without anything being refunded. The warmer the tone, the bigger the irritation.

Repair where acknowledgement was asked for. The customer spends four paragraphs describing how they were transferred three times and had to tell their story twice. The reply is a new shipping confirmation. The parcel arrives, the complaint stays. A week later it's in a review.

Teams often notice that the second complaint is sharper than the first. The cause then lies less in the original mistake. It lies in the sense that the second contact didn't listen either.

Read the complaint a second time with one question: what does the customer spend the most words on?

• If the text is mainly about the product and what should happen to it now, it's repair.
• If it's about money, costs or lost time, it's compensation.
• If it's about how the customer was treated before, it's acknowledgement.

When in doubt, ask. "Would you like us to send a new one, or would you rather have your money back?" isn't a sign of weakness. It's the shortest route to a resolution that sticks.

With acknowledgement a question works less well, because there the reply itself is the acknowledgement. Start by naming what went wrong. Specifically, in the customer's words, without "we're sorry you feel that way".

Record the ask on the ticket too. A month later you'll see which complaints asked for repair, and how often they got a voucher instead.

For ordinary webshops, Dutch law sets no fixed deadline for answering a complaint. You do have to tell customers how you handle complaints. That's part of the information duty enforced by the ACM, the Dutch consumer authority. If you're affiliated with a disputes committee, you also state which one.

With the Thuiswinkel Waarborg trust mark, stricter terms apply. You answer a complaint within 14 days of receipt. If looking into it takes longer, you send an acknowledgement within those 14 days with an indication of when the full answer will follow. The customer then has to give you at least four weeks before they can go to the Thuiswinkel Disputes Committee (Thuiswinkel.org, terms and help centre, 2026).

Many complaints pages still carry something that's no longer correct: the link to the European ODR platform for online disputes. That platform closed on 20 July 2025. The obligation to link to it has lapsed (Regulation (EU) 2024/3228). Remove the link. Anyone who clicks it lands on a notice that the platform no longer exists.

Most complaints aren't settled in one message. A replacement has to be ordered, a carrier called or a refund approved. At that moment someone writes "we'll look into it and get back to you". In practice, that's the sentence where complaints go off the rails.

Three agreements keep that sentence honest:

1. Every promise gets a date. "You'll hear from us by Thursday at the latest" instead of "as soon as possible". A date you meet reassures more than speed you promise.
2. Every promise gets an owner. One person, by name. A complaint that sits "with the team" sits nowhere.
3. You get in touch even when there's nothing yet. If there's no news on the promised day, you send a message anyway. What you know, what you don't know yet and when you'll be in touch again.

That last message feels unnecessary. It's exactly the message that stops the customer from having to chase you, and chasing is where the second complaint begins.

With a complaint about a policy you keep that way on purpose. A customer who thinks returns should be free is asking for compensation you're not going to give. Repair doesn't exist here. What's left is acknowledgement, plus an honest explanation of why the policy is what it is. There's nothing more to give. An exception for whoever complains loudest mainly teaches customers to complain loudly.

With a product that's broken, the law decides part of the answer. Under the Dutch statutory warranty, the customer is entitled to free repair or replacement. The seller then also pays for sending it back (ACM ConsuWijzer, warranty). There's nothing to choose there. The ask only helps you with the tone.

With business customers on a contract, compensation is often already set out in the agreement. There acknowledgement weighs more than you'd expect, because the relationship outlasts that one delivery.

Whatever package you use, a system for complaint handling needs to do four things:

• show a complaint separately from an ordinary question;
• attach an owner and a response time to it;
• turn a promise into a task with a date, so it doesn't only live in the text of an email;
• show the customer's history: earlier conversations, orders and earlier complaints.

Without that last one, acknowledgement is close to impossible. You simply don't know what came before.

In Cuego every email, chat or phone call becomes a ticket with an owner, a status and a time within which it must be answered. With a connected webshop, the customer's orders and earlier conversations sit right next to it. You turn a promise into a task with a deadline and an owner from within the conversation itself. The conversation stays attached to that task, so whoever picks it up doesn't have to work out what it was about first. More on that follow-up under tasks and follow-up.

Tomorrow, take your last twenty complaints and note for each one what the customer wanted back. Next to it, write what you gave. Wherever those two differ, that's where your next review comes from.