Online Dispute Resolution

Online Dispute Resolution
The EU Commission has recently started to provide a platform for out-of-court dispute resolution. This gives consumers the opportunity to resolve disputes in connection with their online orders without the need to go to court.

You can find the online dispute resolution here:
http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr/

The EU Commission's arbitration platform is intended to help to solve cross-border consumer complaints quickly and easily. A multilingual complaint form in all official languages of the EU institutions is used for this purpose. The platform forwards the complaint to the competent national out-of-court dispute resolution body, which then contacts the online provider and tries to resolve the dispute without going to court.

This regulation should not be confused with the new Consumer Dispute Settlement Act, which the German Bundestag adopted as recently as December 2015. However, in contrast to the regulation described here, the new law will not come into force before 2017 at the earliest. When exactly, however, has not yet been determined.