EU rules already decide part of your checkout for shoppers from other member states
In December 2021 PYMNTS published a forecast, produced with the wallet provider Citcon, that cross-border ecommerce would reach $1.2 trillion in 2022, with Europe expected to take 28.3% of it, about $340 billion. The same piece cited a survey in which 30% of consumers in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands said they had bought more from international retailers during the pandemic. Its own focus lay elsewhere: exchange rate risk for the merchant and a speculative case for cryptocurrency as a cross-border payment method. Neither is what a shopper from abroad meets in your checkout.
The forecast is now almost five years old, and the pandemic surge it described could have faded. Eurostat’s figures suggest it did not. In 2021, 31.9% of people in the EU who had bought online in the previous three months had bought from a seller in another EU country. In 2023, the last year of that series, it was 32.8%. In the Netherlands the share rose from 30.0% to 34.4%. Cross-border buying within the EU has settled at roughly one online buyer in three. Some of those shoppers will reach a Dutch checkout, whether or not the webshop has decided to sell abroad.
EU rules decide part of your foreign checkout for you
Since 3 December 2018 the Geo-blocking Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2018/302, has set out how a trader must treat a customer from another member state. Three of its articles land directly in the checkout, and set-ups built for a domestic audience often carry assumptions that conflict with them.
The first concerns access. You may not block or limit a shopper’s access to your site because of nationality, place of residence or place of establishment, and you may not redirect them to a country version with a different layout or language unless they explicitly consent. Even after a redirect they agreed to, the version they first asked for must stay easily accessible. An automatic redirect based on the visitor’s location is therefore the wrong default. A country or language selector that suggests a version and lets the shopper decide is the version that complies, and it also avoids sending a Dutch shopper on holiday in Spain to a Spanish checkout.
The second concerns the sale itself. A shopper from another member state may buy from you on the same terms as a local customer when the goods go to a location you already deliver to, or are collected at a place you agreed on. You are not obliged to start shipping to their country. You are obliged to let them buy for delivery to an address you do serve. A checkout that ties the billing country to the delivery country, or that rejects a postcode, phone number or house number in a foreign format, makes that purchase impossible.
The third concerns payment. Within the means of payment you accept, you may not apply different conditions because the payment account is in another member state, or because the card was issued there. The rule covers credit transfers, direct debits and card payments within the same brand and category, provided the payment meets the strong authentication rules and is in a currency you accept. In practice: if your checkout takes a given card brand and category, a card of that brand and category issued by a Belgian or German bank has to be accepted on the same terms. The same applies to a direct debit from an account in another EU member state. Where you have an objective reason, you may hold back delivery until you have confirmation that the payment has been properly initiated.
A shopper who does not know where you are needs to be told
Eurostat’s series contains a smaller figure that matters for the checkout. In 2023, 16.1% of EU online buyers said they had bought from a seller whose country they did not know, up from 13.4% in 2021. A shopper who cannot tell where a webshop is based also cannot tell which currency, consumer rules or returns address will apply, and that uncertainty peaks at the payment step.
Currency is the most concrete part of it. When a card payment is in one EU currency and the shopper’s account is in another, their card provider converts it and may charge for doing so. EU rules require that charge to be expressed as a percentage mark-up over the European Central Bank’s reference rates. Those rules cover EU currencies only, so a shopper paying from a pound or dollar account falls outside them. Whatever the charge comes to, the amount on your product page and the amount on their statement will not match, and the difference is not yours to control. What you control is clarity. State on the payment step in which currency the amount will be charged. If you show an indicative price in the shopper’s currency elsewhere on the site, label it as indicative and show the euro amount next to it. A total that changes between the basket and the bank app reads as a hidden charge, even when it is the shopper’s own bank that adds it.
Clarity about the seller works in the same way. A line near the order summary saying where the order ships from and to which address returns go answers the question before it is asked. For deliveries outside the EU, say before the payment step who pays any import charges, so they do not appear as a surprise on the doorstep.
Place a test order as a foreign shopper
The fastest audit uses what a foreign shopper would bring with them. Ask a colleague or a contact abroad to place an order with a card or bank account from their own country, a billing address in their country and delivery to an address in the Netherlands. Note every field that rejects their input, every page that switches language or country without asking, every point where the currency of the amount is unclear, and whether their payment method is offered on the same terms as for a Dutch shopper. Repeat it on a phone. Each item on that list is a place where an order from a shopper abroad can stop, and most of them are settings in your form, your country logic or the text on your payment step.
Sources: pymnts.com, ec.europa.eu, Eurostat, eur-lex.europa.eu, Regulation (EU) 2018/302 and eur-lex.europa.eu, Regulation (EU) 2021/1230
