Under EU consumer law (the Consumer Rights Directive), buyers located in the European Union have the right to withdraw from a distance purchase within 14 days, without providing a reason.
When this setting is enabled, EU-based customers will see a withdrawal option on their purchases for 14 days from the date of sale. Submitting a withdrawal request will immediately cancel their subscription access, and a refund request will be sent to you for review — you can approve or deny it from your dashboard.
Note that this right may not apply to digital content that the customer has already begun accessing, depending on whether they provided explicit consent to waive it at checkout — consult a legal professional to ensure your checkout flow is fully compliant.
The Right to Withdraw setting is turned off by default in your account, but this article will walk you through how to turn it on and how it works.
Disclaimer: This article is intended to inform you about what this setting is and how it works. It should not be taken as legal advice for whether or not you need to use the feature. If you're unsure, consult a legal professional.
1. The Right to Withdraw option is located under "Settings" in the left side menu of your MemberVault admin account under the Click to Cancel feature. You can enable or disable this feature from the dropdown menu next to this setting. By default, the Right to Withdraw setting is Off.
2. If Right to Withdraw is enabled, and the buyer is in the EU (MV is able to detect this), when the buyer goes into the billing area of their account, any subscriptions (including payment plans) that started WITHIN the last 14 days will now have a "Withdraw subscription" option.
3. When the member withdraws, the process is very similar to our click to cancel feature. Our system will automatically end the ongoing subscription, schedule access to be revoked, and send a confirmation email to the buyer and the admin.
4. However, Right to Withdraw has some more options than Click-to-Cancel. In your admin dashboard under "Activity" > "Sales", you'll see "Pending Withdraws" near the bottom of the page.
5. If you click on the payment information on one of them, you will see options to issue a partial or full refund. Note, this is only available for Stripe. Paypal buyers will see a note to manage this in Paypal.
Stripe users can also choose to reactivate their subscription (just like with cancels).
Whether any refund is deserved or a partial is up to you as the admin. We're not able to advise you one way or the other on what to do in this case -- we just provide the options for you to be able to choose.
6. If you click issue partial / full refund, you'll see a new box that populates the amount of the last payment of the subscription. To give a full refund, just process that payment amount. Alternatively, you can change that number to something else, but rest assured you will not be able to exceed that number!
If you process a refund, then your member's access to the product is immediately revoked and the cancellation is finalized.
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Questions? Reach out to us at hello@membervault.co, within our Facebook group, The MV Collaborative, or via chat support within your admin account (not sure how to log in? look up your account here).