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Customer service and returns
A customer paid for next-day delivery and then cancels: how much of the delivery charge do you refund?
A cancelling customer gets delivery refunded, but only up to your cheapest standard option if they chose faster. Five worked orders show the sums.
A customer orders a £40.00 jumper and pays £7.99 for next-day delivery. Your standard delivery is £3.99. Four days later they cancel. Do you refund £47.99, £43.99 or £40.00?
For a consumer who cancels an online order within the cancellation period, regulation 34 of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 gives the answer. The answer is £43.99, provided standard delivery was on offer.
What regulation 34 says
Three paragraphs do the work:
- Goods money. The trader "must reimburse all payments, other than payments for delivery, received from the consumer", subject to a deduction rule for goods handled beyond what is needed to inspect them.
- Delivery money. The trader "must reimburse any payment for delivery received from the consumer, unless the consumer expressly chose" a kind of delivery "costing more than the least expensive common and generally acceptable kind of delivery offered by the trader".
- If they did choose dearer. The trader must then reimburse delivery payments "up to the amount" the consumer "would have paid if the consumer had chosen the least expensive common and generally acceptable kind of delivery offered by the trader".
So the delivery charge is refunded, but a customer who expressly picked something faster gets back only the price of your cheapest ordinary option. The phrase "expressly chose" matters: if the checkout pre-selected the dearer option and the customer never actively picked it, the safe reading is that they did not expressly choose it.
Five invented orders
| Order | Goods | Delivery paid | Cheapest ordinary option | Delivery refunded | Total refunded | Customer bears |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Standard chosen | £40.00 | £3.99 | £3.99 | £3.99 | £43.99 | £0.00 |
| B. Next-day chosen | £40.00 | £7.99 | £3.99 | £3.99 | £43.99 | £4.00 |
| C. Only one option | £40.00 | £6.50 | £6.50 | £6.50 | £46.50 | £0.00 |
| D. Over a free-delivery threshold, express chosen | £55.00 | £6.99 | £0.00 | £0.00 | £55.00 | £6.99 |
| E. Two-item order, express chosen | £120.00 | £9.99 | £4.49 | £4.49 | £124.49 | £5.50 |
Check the arithmetic. A: 40.00 plus 3.99 is 43.99. B: 40.00 plus 3.99 is 43.99, and 7.99 minus 3.99 is 4.00. C: 40.00 plus 6.50 is 46.50. D: the cheapest ordinary option for this basket cost nothing, so the delivery refund is 0.00, the total is 55.00, and the customer bears the whole 6.99. E: 120.00 plus 4.49 is 124.49, and 9.99 minus 4.49 is 5.50.
AI staff and workflows for independent online retailers. Starting with "where's my order" and returns.See what we would set upRow D is the one to read twice. If your free standard delivery applies at £50 and the customer chose express anyway, paragraph 3 caps the delivery refund at what they would have paid for standard, which was nothing. That is our reading of the paragraph, not a tested one.
When the money is due
For a sales contract where you have not offered to collect the goods, paragraph 5 sets the end of 14 days after the day you receive the goods back, or, if earlier, the day the customer supplies evidence of having sent them back. If the jumper reaches you on Monday 9 November 2026, 14 days later is Monday 23 November 2026 (9 plus 14 is 23). Refund the whole sum, including the capped delivery, by then.
What this does not tell you
We did not read the rest of the Regulations, so this says nothing about who pays to send the goods back, or about a faulty item, which is a separate right. For those steps use the returns rights checker and the request-to-money-back checklist. For showing delivery in the price in the first place, see drip pricing and postage.
What to do this week
- Write down your cheapest common delivery option, including any free-delivery threshold, so the cap is a known figure.
- Make sure checkout requires the customer to pick a dearer option actively, not by default.
- Put the capped-delivery rule in your returns page, with one worked example like row B.
- Record the date goods come back, and add 14 days.
Overlyft 
can set up AI staff who join your team, read each cancellation, work out the refund with the delivery cap and the deadline, and draft the reply for a person to check and send.
This is general information, not legal advice. The Regulations give the answer for your own order.
Where this comes from: legislation.gov.uk, The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, regulation 34 (reimbursement by the trader), paragraphs 1 to 3, 5 and 6. Read 24 October 2026. We did not read regulation 35 or the rest of the Regulations, including the rules on when goods must be sent back and who pays for that, and the page we read showed a cross-reference in paragraph 6 that an amending regulation has changed. The free-delivery row applies the cap in paragraph 3 as we read it; check it against your own terms. The five orders and all prices are invented.
AEO Lookup editorial team
We write practical guides for people who run small UK firms, and we check every fact against its source on the date shown. Read how we review, or tell us if something has changed.
