Selling to EU Buyers? Your Checkout Just Learned Some Law

Sam Bakker · Founder, GoCushy · July 29, 2026

If you sell digital products to EU or UK buyers, three things changed around you this year — quietly, and with real consequences. We just shipped the first piece of GoCushy's answer, and it's live on our own founding checkout right now. Fair warning before the details: I'm a founder, not your lawyer, and none of this is legal advice — it's what we learned building for our own compliance, shared plainly.

What changed in EU law

• The "withdrawal button" is mandatory now. Since June 19, 2026, online checkouts selling to EU consumers must offer an easily accessible withdrawal function — and it binds non-EU sellers who target EU buyers too.
• Silence is expensive. The 14-day cooling-off right is old news; what's less known is that if the required withdrawal information is never given, the window stretches to 12 months. A missing paragraph turns a two-week obligation into a year-long one.
• The waiver checkbox died in July. On July 9, 2026 the CJEU ruled (the Sky Österreich case) that for ongoing digital services — memberships, subscriptions, anything with continuing access — a "you waive your withdrawal right" checkbox does not extinguish the 14-day right. Withdrawal survives, with pro-rata payment for what was used.

What we shipped

Every GoCushy checkout now supports a legal notice block: seller-configured small print rendered under the pay button — before payment, where disclosure duties live — and repeated automatically in the buyer's receipt email, which is the "durable medium" confirmation the rules ask for. It's plain text, length-capped, and escaped, like every GoCushy checkout block: your AI can set it, and neither of you can break the page with it.

We're our own first customer. The founding checkout tells EU and UK buyers exactly what they're entitled to: a 14-day right of withdrawal, no reason needed. And it's no longer just a notice — buyers sign in to their purchase portal and press one button. We record the moment they asked, because the reimbursement clock runs from when the seller is informed, confirm it to them by email, and alert the seller with the amount and the date they have to pay it by. The seller issues the refund; we make sure nobody has to compose an email to exercise a right.

To set yours: it's the legal_note field in your checkout blocks — per offer, or account-wide as a seller default. Tell your agent what your policy is and it writes the block; the developer docs have the field reference.

What's honestly next

A notice and a button are the floor, not the ceiling. Being straight about where the line currently sits: gocushy records the request, times it, and tells both sides — it does not move the money. The seller issues the refund from their own dashboard, on their own Stripe or PayPal, because it was never our money to return. There is also no default wording shipped for you; the block is empty until you or your agent write your policy into it, and what it says is your call, not ours.

What we're building next, in order: automatic refund execution on withdrawal so the seller doesn't have to remember, consent capture at checkout where the digital-content exception genuinely applies, and pro-rata refund support for subscriptions — because after Sky Österreich, that's the only honest design for recurring offers.

Sam Bakker is the founder of GoCushy. He has a long track record building launch and funnel software for creators, and builds from New Zealand.