A shopper abroad gives you one order to prove yourself, and most of that order happens after the payment
In November 2021 PYMNTS interviewed Na’Imah Muhammad, owner of Brazilian Bundle Me, an online seller of wigs and hair extensions, for its Cross-Border Retail Payments Tracker. She credited a wide choice of payment methods for the shop’s sales, said customers had asked for curbside pickup, Afterpay and cashless payment, and said the shop was preparing to accept partial payments. Alongside the interview PYMNTS cited two figures: 59% of online shoppers would not give a retailer in another country a second chance after an unsatisfactory purchase, and 54% would be more willing to buy from a company abroad if buy now, pay later were available. The article does not say who was asked, in which countries or when, so both figures show a direction rather than a measurement.
PYMNTS presented both numbers as reasons to offer more ways to pay. Read from the shopper’s side, the first one points somewhere else. Whether a purchase was unsatisfactory is rarely settled in the payment step. It is settled when the parcel arrives, when something has to go back, and when the money does or does not reappear on a statement. A shopper buying from another country for the first time has no history with your shop to soften a bad experience there, and if the figure is anywhere near right, often no second order to make up for it.
Paying later is a hedge against the after-sales
The second figure can be read the same way. A shopper who wants to pay after delivery keeps their money until the order has proven itself, and that wish is stronger with an unknown seller in another country. That is my reading, not the article’s, but it changes what you do with the figure. Part of the same doubt can be removed for every payment method, not only a deferred one, by answering before the payment the questions the shopper would otherwise only face after it: who pays to send a return from their country, which country the return goes to, what starts the refund, how long it takes and where the money comes back.
The rules settle the refund route, your checkout has to explain it
Inside the EU, most of those answers are fixed by the Consumer Rights Directive, 2011/83/EU. For goods bought at a distance the shopper has 14 days to withdraw without giving a reason, counted from the day they receive the goods. The trader refunds without undue delay and at the latest within 14 days of being told of the withdrawal, including the delivery charge up to the cost of the cheapest standard delivery, using the same means of payment the shopper used unless they expressly agreed to something else, and without charging for it. Unless the trader offered to collect the goods, it may hold the refund until the goods are back or the shopper shows proof of sending them, whichever comes first. The shopper bears only the direct cost of the return, and only if they were told before buying that they would have to pay for it.
Each of these rules lands differently on a shopper abroad. A return parcel that crosses a border costs more and travels longer than a domestic one, so a policy that charges the return to the shopper and refunds on receipt makes a foreign shopper pay more and wait longer than your domestic customers for the same refund. The refund goes back through the method used, so any local method you add for a country should be one your team can refund to without manual workarounds before you switch it on. The law requires you to say before the purchase that the shopper pays for the return, not what it will cost. Stating what a return from the shopper’s country costs, next to the order summary rather than on a returns page written for domestic customers, is the step that removes the doubt.
From 19 June 2026 EU rules put the withdrawal in your own interface
One part of this has changed since the interview. Directive (EU) 2023/2673 added a withdrawal function to the Consumer Rights Directive and requires member states to apply it from 19 June 2026, so it reaches your shop through the national law of each country, once implemented there. Where a contract is concluded through an online interface, the shopper must be able to withdraw through a function labelled “withdraw from contract here” or an equally clear wording, prominently displayed and available throughout the withdrawal period. The shopper gives or confirms their name, the details of the contract and how they want to receive the confirmation, submits through a confirmation step with a fixed label of its own, and receives an acknowledgement on a durable medium without undue delay, stating the content of the withdrawal and the date and time it was sent. The recitals make clear that this applies to all distance contracts, not only to financial services.
For a shopper abroad this function is often the first after-sales screen they meet. The law fixes the labels, not the language, so showing the function in the language the shopper ordered in, prefilled from the order they are looking at, is your choice, and in my view the right one. The same goes for the order confirmation, which the directive requires on a durable medium within a reasonable time and at the latest on delivery. Write it in the language of the checkout, with the amount in the currency charged, the payment method used, the return address with its country, how the withdrawal period is counted and a direct link to the withdrawal function.
Return an order from abroad before you sell there
Place an order as a shopper from one of the countries you sell to, with an address and a payment method from that country. Withdraw through the function, send the item back by the cheapest route a shopper there would use, and log each step until the refund appears on the shopper’s statement: what each message said and in which language, what the return cost, and how many days each stage took. Then put the answers to the five questions above next to the order summary for that country. Every point where your test shopper had to ask, search or wait without news is a point where a real one decides not to come back.
Sources: pymnts.com, eur-lex.europa.eu and eur-lex.europa.eu
