Writing a correct acknowledgement of receipt

The withdrawal button is installed in minutes. What decides compliance is the e-mail that goes out afterwards – and that is where many implementations fail, over a single sentence.

Last reviewed: August 2026 · Guide

What the acknowledgement has to contain

Directive (EU) 2023/2673 requires the trader to acknowledge receipt of the withdrawal declaration without undue delay and on a durable medium. An e-mail is enough. Germany spells the requirement out in § 356a (4) of the Civil Code (BGB), France in art. L221-21 and D221-5 of the Code de la consommation, the Netherlands in art. 6:230oa BW. Four elements belong in it:

• Date and time of receipt. Not the date alone – whether the deadline was met depends on the exact moment.
• The content of the declaration submitted. What was withdrawn, not merely the news that something arrived.
• A statement that only receipt is being confirmed – not the validity of the withdrawal.
• A way to reply and an identifiable sender.

The sentence that makes the difference

The trader owes the acknowledgement regardless of whether the withdrawal is valid at all. It is a pure receipt. Phrase it like a promise, and it becomes something else: an acknowledgement of the right itself.

That is not a theoretical risk. If a store confirms "Your withdrawal has been accepted" although the deadline had long expired, or although the goods were excluded from the right of withdrawal, it may be held to that statement. A mandatory e-mail turns into a voluntary take-back – on every single case, again and again.

Wordings compared

The right-hand column costs nothing in friendliness. It simply refrains from promising something nobody has checked yet.

Why this goes wrong in practice

The reason is rarely the button – that part is uncritical. It is the confirmation e-mail, which usually grew out of an existing order or returns template. Those templates are tuned for customer friendliness, and so they confirm exactly the wrong thing. German practitioners writing after the June 2026 start date reported that a number of plugins still did not meet the requirement; the acknowledgement, not the button, was the recurring weak point.

A second, quieter mistake: an acknowledgement that states only the date. It fails the documentation duty and takes away your own evidence in a dispute.

Language is part of the requirement

The statement has to be clear and comprehensible. If you offer a form in the customer's language but send the legally decisive clarification in English only, that is worth having checked. A localised form with a mandatory element in a foreign language is a gap that is easy to overlook.