ACM's 2026 Crackdown on Late Deliveries and Slow Refunds: What Every European E-Commerce Shipper Must Fix

The Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets, known as the ACM, has quietly turned its 2026 supervisory agenda into one of the more consequential compliance events in European e-commerce this year. Buried inside a document about data control, online safety, and digital resilience sits a warning that shipping and fulfillment teams cannot afford to skim past: consumer complaints about retail are at a record high, and three of the biggest categories are all logistics problems wearing a regulatory hat. Products that never arrive. Warranty claims that get ignored when something breaks too soon. Refunds that take weeks longer than the law allows.

At Zineps we work with shipment data from hundreds of European webshops every week, and the pattern behind these ACM numbers is one we recognize instantly. What looks like a customer service ticket almost always started three steps earlier, in a warehouse scan that never happened, a return that sat unprocessed in a bin, or a delivery promise that was never realistic in the first place. In 2026, that operational gap has stopped being a private problem between a brand and its customers. It is now the kind of pattern a national regulator actively goes looking for.

What the ACM Is Actually Watching in 2026

The ACM's 2026 agenda names a safe and fair digital economy as one of its three strategic priorities for the year, alongside sustainability and innovation. Inside that priority, digital accessibility of webshops and other online services stays under active supervision, and the authority is wrapping up an investigation into the conduct of a major online marketplace. None of that reads like a shipping story on the surface.

The number underneath it does. The ACM received a record volume of consumer signals about retail in 2025, with complaints and questions up more than 45 percent compared with the year before. The three recurring themes the authority itself points to are products not arriving on time, warranties not being honored when goods fail quickly, and refunds not being paid out on time or at all after a valid return. Two of those three are shipping and returns operations problems by any other name, and the third, warranty handling, still runs through the same reverse logistics chain that processes every return.

Late Delivery Stopped Being Just a Churn Problem

For years, a missed delivery promise was framed almost entirely as a customer experience issue: a annoyed shopper, a support ticket, maybe a lost repeat purchase. Under the EU's Consumer Rights Directive, it has always also been a legal one. Unless a retailer and shopper agree otherwise, goods must be delivered within thirty days, and if that deadline is missed after the retailer is given a final chance to perform, the consumer is entitled to a full refund and can walk away from the contract entirely. A regulator that is actively counting complaints about non-arrival is, in effect, counting how often retailers are quietly failing that obligation at scale.

The Metric Gap Behind Most "We Deliver On Time" Claims

Most merchants believe they are fine on this front because their average on-time delivery number looks healthy in a monthly report. The problem is that the promise shown to the shopper at checkout and the promise a carrier can actually keep are frequently two different numbers, and few businesses measure the gap between them directly. We covered why that gap quietly decides conversion, returns, and even paid search performance in our piece on estimated delivery date accuracy, and it is the first place we point a merchant when an ACM-style complaint pattern starts showing up in their own support inbox. A related blind spot sits in first-attempt delivery performance, which we break down in our guide to first-attempt delivery success rate: a parcel that fails twice before succeeding on the third knock still counts as "on time" in most dashboards, even though the recipient experienced exactly the kind of failure the ACM is now counting as a signal.

Slow Refunds Create a Second, Separate Exposure

Refund timing is its own legal clock, and it is stricter than most operations teams assume. Once a consumer exercises a right of withdrawal, the retailer generally has fourteen days to refund the full purchase price, starting from whichever comes first: the day the goods are received back, or the day the consumer provides evidence of having sent them. In practice, that clock almost never starts with a finance decision. It starts with a warehouse scan, and if that scan is late, buried in a batch process, or dependent on a manual reconciliation between a 3PL and a webshop's order management system, the retailer is often already in breach before anyone in finance even knows a return exists.

This is exactly the mechanism we described in our analysis of the disposition gap in e-commerce returns: the moment a parcel is scanned back into a warehouse is rarely the moment it gets processed, inspected, and cleared for refund, and every day in between is a day the ACM's clock keeps running against the retailer, not the warehouse.

Digital Accessibility Enters the Compliance Conversation Too

The ACM's brief explicitly keeps digital accessibility of webshops under supervision in 2026, a mandate that lines up with the European Accessibility Act's broader push into e-commerce. Most retailers read that as a website design requirement and stop there. It is not. A tracking page that only communicates status through color, a shipping notification email that a screen reader cannot parse, or an SMS update with no accessible fallback are all part of the same customer journey a regulator is now scoring. Shipping communication has quietly become an accessibility surface, not just an operations one, and almost nobody outside a dedicated logistics team has noticed yet.

What This Actually Means Operationally for Shippers

Strip away the legal language and three operational disciplines determine whether a business is exposed or protected.

• Delivery promises shown at checkout need to reflect what carriers can actually deliver on that specific route, not a static company-wide average.
• Returns need to trigger the refund clock the moment they physically enter the reverse logistics chain, not whenever a person gets around to keying it into an ERP.
• Every delivery attempt, failed or successful, needs a timestamped, carrier-level record that a business can produce instantly if a regulator or a payment processor ever asks for it.

Retailers who already unify this data tend to discover their real performance is fine and simply invisible. Retailers who do not tend to discover the gap only after a complaint has already reached a regulator's desk, which is a far more expensive place to find out.

A Practical Compliance Checklist Before ACM Comes Knocking

1. Audit the delivery date shown at checkout against actual carrier performance by route, segmented by postal region, not averaged nationally.
2. Confirm your returns workflow logs a timestamp the moment a parcel is scanned in by a carrier or warehouse, and that this timestamp, not an internal ticket, starts the refund clock.
3. Set a refund SLA inside your finance and operations tooling that flags any return approaching day twelve, two days before the legal deadline, not after it has passed.
4. Pull attempt-level tracking events, not just final delivery status, so a failed first attempt is visible before it becomes a complaint.
5. Review shipping and returns notifications for accessibility: plain language status updates, text alternatives to color-coded statuses, and a working fallback channel for every automated message.
6. Keep a single, exportable audit trail across every carrier and 3PL you use, so a regulator or a customer dispute never has to wait on someone manually assembling data from five different portals.

How Zineps Turns This Compliance Risk Into an Operational Advantage

This is the exact seam Zineps was built to sit on top of. As the Operating System for Shipments, Zineps connects checkout, carriers, warehouses, and fulfillment partners into one coordinated layer instead of a collection of dashboards that only agree with each other after someone reconciles them by hand.

In practice, that means delivery promises at checkout are generated from live carrier performance data rather than a static estimate, so the number a shopper sees is the number a courier can actually hit. It means a scan event at any carrier or 3PL in your network can trigger the refund clock automatically, instead of waiting for a person to notice a return has arrived. And it means every attempt, delay, and delivery outcome across every carrier you use lives in one place, timestamped and exportable, ready the moment a regulator, a payment provider, or your own finance team needs proof of what actually happened.

None of this requires replacing the carriers or logistics partners you already work with. Zineps is designed to orchestrate the shipping stack you already have, not rebuild it, which is precisely why merchants can close an ACM-style exposure gap in weeks rather than by ripping out an existing setup and starting over.

The Bigger Picture

Regulators rarely invent new obligations out of nowhere. The ACM's 2026 focus on late delivery, slow refunds, and accessibility is simply consumer law finally catching up to how e-commerce actually operates, and it is aimed squarely at the operational gaps that shipping and logistics teams have quietly tolerated for years because nobody was counting them in public. That counting has now started.

The businesses that will feel the least pressure from this shift are the ones already treating delivery accuracy, refund speed, and audit-ready tracking data as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought bolted onto a shipping label. If you want to see where your own operation stands before a complaint, rather than after one, Zineps can show you the gap and help you close it. That is what an operating system for shipments is for.