A return policy for your webshop: five questions and the 2026 withdrawal button

Put your return window in one place and refer to that place everywhere else. That advice comes before any wording. A window stated separately on the product page, in the FAQ and in the terms and conditions will drift apart sooner or later. Someone changes one after a promotion or a new carrier, and the other two stay as they were.

On a webshop we scanned, the returns page stated a 100-day window. Elsewhere on the same site it said the withdrawal period was 30 days. The two can coexist, but nowhere did it say how. A customer reading both can't tell which one applies to them. They may ask your customer service, or assume the most favourable one.

A return policy is rarely read out of curiosity. Whoever opens it is hesitating over a purchase or has something that needs to go back. That reader asks five questions, usually in this order:

1. Am I allowed? How long do I have, from when does it count, and which products are excluded?
2. How do I do it? Where do I register it, does it need its box, where do I drop it off?
3. What does it cost? Do I pay for the return shipping, and if so how much?
4. When do I get my money? Within what period, and do I get the shipping costs back?
5. What if it's broken? Does the same apply, or something else?

These are the five return questions. Every question your page leaves open tends to end up with your customer service. A return policy is done when someone can answer all five without emailing you.

Under Dutch and EU consumer law, online purchases by consumers come with a cooling-off period of 14 days. For products it runs until 14 days after the day of receipt. Within that time the customer may cancel the purchase without giving a reason. After that they have another 14 days to send the product back (ACM, cooling-off period, 2026).

For the money, these rules apply:

• You refund within 14 days of the customer cancelling the purchase.
• You also refund the original shipping costs, up to the amount of standard delivery.
• You may wait to refund until the product is back, or until the customer shows they've sent it.
• Return shipping costs are for the customer, but only if you stated that clearly in advance. Otherwise they're yours.
• If a product comes back dirty or damaged, you may charge for the loss in value. That applies when the customer used it more than needed to inspect it.

There are exceptions, for example for custom-made goods, perishables and sealed hygiene products that have been opened. Only list the exceptions that apply to your range. A complete list copied from a template mainly makes customers wonder whether their item falls under it.

Vagueness carries a heavy penalty. If you give too little information about the cooling-off period, or the model withdrawal form is missing, the cooling-off period is extended by a year.

Since 25 June 2026, webshops in the Netherlands must offer customers a withdrawal function. That's a button or function on the site with which the customer cancels the purchase online within the cooling-off period. The obligation comes from EU Directive 2023/2673 and is laid down in Dutch law in Article 6:230oa of the Civil Code. The EU set 19 June 2026 as the date. The Dutch act was published in the Staatsblad on 24 June (2026, 153) and has applied since the day after.

What the function has to do:

• It is clearly visible and easy to find.
• Its label states in unambiguous words that the customer is withdrawing from the contract.
• It's available for the entire cooling-off period.
• The customer only fills in what's needed: their name, which order it concerns and how to reach them.
• After confirming, the customer immediately receives an acknowledgement on a durable medium, such as an email.

For your customer service this is more than a legal tick box. A customer who arranges their withdrawal themselves doesn't need to email about it. It does mean your returns process has to connect to whatever that button sets in motion. If the customer gets a confirmation while your warehouse or customer service knows nothing about it, the question comes anyway.

Customers call everything that goes back a "return". Legally they're two different things. A return policy that mixes them up risks charging costs it isn't allowed to charge.

With a withdrawal, the customer uses their cooling-off period. They don't need to give a reason, and the return costs may be theirs if you said so in advance. With a broken or faulty product, the customer falls under the statutory warranty. The seller then has to repair or replace it free of charge, and the cost of sending it back is the seller's (ACM ConsuWijzer, warranty). That warranty doesn't stop after 14 days, nor necessarily when the manufacturer's warranty ends.

So give your returns page a separate route for "my product is broken or not right". A customer with a faulty product who sees shipping costs in your returns form rightly feels short-changed. How to handle that complaint afterwards is covered in handling complaints in your webshop.

A 30 or 100-day window and free returns are strong selling points. For customer questions, more generous only works if it's also simpler. A generous policy with exceptions raises more questions than a tight policy that's clear. Think of "free returns, except on sale items" or "100 days, but only unworn and with the label attached".

Every exception is a sentence the customer has to find, read and apply to their own order. If they can't do that without help, you've built in a customer question. So rather choose a shorter window without conditions than a long one with three footnotes. Or keep the long window and drop the footnotes.

The statutory right of withdrawal doesn't apply to business customers. If you also sell to businesses, state at the top which rules apply to whom. Otherwise a business customer reading your consumer policy will count on rights they don't have.

Whatever package you use, a system needs to do two things well with return questions. The answer about your terms comes from the same text as your returns page, so that no agent or AI tells its own version. And the system can pull up the order. "Can I still send this back?" can only be answered once you know which order it is and when it was delivered.

In Cuego, agents and AI answer from the same knowledge base. Change the window there, and the AI in chat and email uses the new one straight away. For a return question, a workflow retrieves the order from your webshop, checks whether it qualifies and gives the customer the steps. How that continues through to the refund is covered in handling returns with AI and workflows.

The Cuego scan reads your website the way a customer does. Among other things, it looks up the return windows on your site and flags it when they contradict each other. Scan your webshop and see what a customer gets to read about your return window.

List the five return questions and write next to each one the sentence on your site that answers it. Wherever you can't find a sentence, you know where your next customer question will come from.