Running an online store in the UK? Since April 2025, three separate rule changes have landed which might impact how your checkout behaves. None of them require a deep understanding of the law but they are worth keeping in mind when choosing plugins for your site and keeping it up to date.
This article covers what changed, what it means for shops of any size from the small shop to the national chain, and what to actually check. We’ve written this for every skill level – from current store owners to aspiring entrepreneurs, so that everyone knows what to look for when building a checkout and what plugins or pitfalls to avoid.
Important Deadlines
| Date | What changed | Who it applies to |
|---|---|---|
| 6 April 2025 | DMCC Act bans drip pricing. All mandatory charges must be in the first price shown. | Any UK trader selling to consumers |
| 18 November 2025 | CMA publishes final price transparency guidance, plus first investigations under the new powers. | Any UK trader selling to consumers |
| 15 July 2026 | Buy now, pay later becomes regulated Deferred Payment Credit under the FCA. | BNPL lenders directly, merchants indirectly |
| 19 June 2026 | EU withdrawal function required under Directive (EU) 2023/2673. | Anyone selling online to EU consumers, including non-EU traders |
| Spring 2027 | New subscription contract rules on auto-renewal, exit routes and cooling-off periods. | Anyone selling recurring products |
Drip Pricing Ban & What is Drip Pricing?
Since 6 April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has banned drip pricing. Drip pricing is the practice of showing one price up front, then adding unavoidable fees as the customer moves through checkout – a well-established example being a B2C site that displays pricing ex-VAT, then adds VAT once the item is in the cart. The CMA published its final price transparency guidance on 18 November 2025, so this is still relatively new.
To go into more detail any charge a customer cannot avoid has to be in the total price from the very first price they see. So booking fees, service fees and mandatory delivery charges all count, and it’s not just what’s in the checkout: it applies anywhere you advertise your pricing, including your ads, your emails and your product pages. Showing a fee separately alongside the headline price is not enough, if that fee is considered part of an items total cost it needs to be displayed as such.
In practice this is actively enforced legislation with the CMA fining the AA and BSM driving schools £4.2 million and ordering refunds to more than 80,000 learner drivers, all over a mandatory £3 booking fee that only appeared after customers had picked a lesson time and entered their details. That was the first financial penalty the CMA has issued for a consumer law breach using its new direct enforcement powers, so this is clearly something it is actively pursuing rather than a one-off fine. This is further supported by a further eight investigations opened into other businesses, plus advisory letters to a hundred more.
What this means for your store, practically:
- Avoid any plugin that bolts a compulsory fee onto checkout, whether that is a handling charge, a card fee or a “service” line.
- Check your shipping setup is not presenting an unavoidable charge late in the journey. If every order must pay postage, the postage needs to be visible in the first price or built into it.
- If a charge genuinely is optional, such as gift wrapping or an upgrade to next-day delivery, it can stay out of the headline price.
Changes in BNPL Regulation
From 15 July 2026, buy now, pay later became regulated Deferred Payment Credit under the Financial Conduct Authority. Before that date these agreements sat outside the regulatory perimeter, so the lenders did not need FCA authorisation.
The good news for merchants is that the regulated firms are the third-party lenders, not you. Offering Klarna or Clearpay does not put your shop inside the perimeter. The FCA is explicit that the rules bite where the lender and the supplier of the goods are different businesses.
What does land on you is presentation. Lenders now have mandatory customer-facing information that has to be surfaced in the checkout journey. Two things follow from that:
- Keep your BNPL plugin updated. The compliance information arrives through plugin updates, so a plugin you installed in 2024 and left alone is a risk.
- Do not strip out its messaging blocks to tidy up a product page. Those blocks are increasingly there for a regulatory reason rather than a marketing one.
Customers also gained access to the Financial Ombudsman Service from 15 July, and lenders now have to run proportionate affordability checks, including on purchases under £50.
Selling to EU consumers means you need a withdrawal function
Since 19 June 2026, Directive (EU) 2023/2673 has required online traders selling to EU consumers to provide a clearly labelled electronic withdrawal function. This is the rule sometimes called the “withdrawal button”.
The scope catches more UK stores than people expect. The test is where your customer is, not where you are. A UK shop that ships to Ireland or the continent is in scope, because the directive applies to non-EU traders targeting the EU market.
The requirement is specific, and a generic contact form does not satisfy it:
- It has to be easy to find, and clearly labelled as a way to withdraw from the contract.
- It has to work for guest customers, without requiring them to log in or create an account.
- It has to stay available for the whole 14-day withdrawal period.
- It needs a two-step confirmation, so the customer confirms before the withdrawal is submitted.
- You have to send an acknowledgement on a durable medium. Email is fine.
Some member states mandate specific wording in their national implementation, so check the markets you actually sell into.
The downside of getting this wrong is not trivial. Fines can reach 4% of annual turnover in the member states concerned, with a minimum of €2 million. Separately, if you fail to tell customers about the withdrawal function in your pre-contractual terms, the withdrawal period itself stretches to 12 months and 14 days per contract. That is a long window in which a customer can unwind a sale.
Fake reviews and subscription traps
Two more changes belong on the radar.
The DMCC Act also bans fake reviews. That covers submitting or commissioning them, publishing reviews in a misleading way, and running a review system without reasonable steps to detect and remove fakes. Incentivised reviews are allowed, but the incentive has to be disclosed clearly. If you offer a discount code in exchange for a review, say so on the review.
New subscription contract rules were expected sooner and have been pushed back to spring 2027. They will require clear pre-contract information, reminders before auto-renewal, straightforward exit routes, and cooling-off periods with refunds. The regime includes two separate 14-day cancellation windows: one immediately after signing up, and a renewal window after a trial ends or a long contract auto-renews. If you sell anything recurring, this is worth designing for now rather than retrofitting later.
What to actually check
A short pass through your own store covers most of the exposure:
- Open a product page as a customer and note the first price you see. Add the item to a basket and go to checkout. If the total went up because of something the customer could not avoid, that needs fixing.
- List your active payment and shipping plugins, and check when each was last updated. Anything abandoned is both a compliance risk and a pricing risk.
- If you ship to the EU, find your withdrawal function. If you cannot find one, you do not have one.
- Check any review incentives are disclosed on the reviews themselves.
- If you sell subscriptions, look at your renewal reminders and your cancellation route before spring 2027.
Most of this is configuration rather than cost. The plugins that handle payments, shipping and tax on a UK store all have free versions, and our guide to the best free WooCommerce plugins for UK online stores covers which ones are worth running.
Further reading
The FCA’s page on buy now, pay later sets out what changed in July 2026 and who the rules apply to. For the drip pricing enforcement action, the CMA’s announcement on the AA and BSM driving schools is worth reading for the detail of what actually breached the rules. The CMA’s own price transparency guidance, final since 18 November 2025, is the document to check your checkout against, and its three-step pricing check is the quickest way to do it.
On tax, HMRC’s VAT registration guidance covers thresholds and timing, including the rolling 12-month test that catches growing shops out.
If you are still setting up, our comparison of ecommerce and traditional shops sets out what selling online involves, and testing changes on a staging site is the safe way to alter a live checkout.
None of these rules require expensive software. They mostly require knowing what your checkout actually shows a customer, which is a thing worth checking twice a year rather than never.
