One storefront, two regimes: printed shirts and the right to return

Monday morning, the service line. Luca has barely logged in when a fan calls. His shirt with a name and number has arrived, and he wants to send it back.

Luca knows the sentence that ends calls like this. Almost every German club shop carries it: personalized goods are excluded from the right of return. In the audit of 66 club shops it was the best-documented rule in the dataset.

This time the call does not end. It is only a player's name on the back, the caller says, and he sends a screenshot. Luca's screen shows order number, item and amount, but not which name was ordered, in which version.

Luca is invented; the sentence on his screen is not. His shop also ships to Switzerland, and the sentence travels across the Swiss border. The statute behind it does not. Two legal regimes sit on one product page, and only one applies to an order.

In Germany it is open whether the exclusion holds in a dispute. In Switzerland no statute supports it and none limits it. Both roads end in the same question: who can prove what was ordered?

Luca promises a callback and starts reading. In short:

• Germany: § 312g(2) BGB excludes personalized goods. No ruling in this research says where that edge runs for a shirt.
• Switzerland: an online order carries no withdrawal right. The returns rule is the club's own.
• Which regime applies follows the customer's residence, and after that only the record of the single order counts.
• Scope: German, EU and Swiss law, not UK law.

First stop: the German statute.

What § 312g BGB actually says

§ 312g(1) of the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch grants a right of withdrawal under § 355, for contracts concluded away from business premises and for distance contracts.

Paragraph (2) no. 1 excludes goods of one kind. In our translation of the German text on Gesetze im Internet, the exclusion covers goods

"which are not prefabricated and for whose production an individual selection or determination by the consumer is decisive, or which are clearly tailored to the consumer's personal needs"

FC Bayern München excludes "Individualisierte Produkte (z. B. Kleidung mit Beflockung oder Bestickung)" from returns on its returns page. Eintracht Frankfurt's shop FAQ excludes shirts printed to order: "Trikots, die individuell beflockt werden sollen, [sind] vom Widerrufsrecht ausgeschlossen".

In these clauses the category matters, not the wording. The statute names the class but not where it ends, and that edge is what Luca's caller wants to talk about.

A case with no shirt at all shows how a court reads such an edge.

A brass nameplate in Cottbus

The Landgericht Cottbus decided a case on September 29, 2022 about a facsimile book priced at EUR 7,920 with a promised brass nameplate (2 O 223/21). We did not have the judgment text, only the report on a trade blog for shop operators.

The plate's relation to the whole decided it. On that account the plate was worth "weit unter 1 % des vereinbarten Kaufpreises", far below 1 percent of the price, and it "ließ sich problemlos wieder entfernen" (easily removable). The court rejected the exclusion.

The deciding questions transfer: share of price, reversibility, resale value. That last question separates two cases most clauses do not.

A shirt with an invented name is not sold twice. A shirt with a squad player's name and standard number is ordinary, stockable goods. The consumer body Verbraucherzentrale Nordrhein-Westfalen took that distinction, with the fantasy name "Tiki-Taka-Pep" as its example, as the Stuttgarter Nachrichten reported on September 2, 2014. That is a position from 2014, not a ruling.

Which name was really ordered, Luca cannot yet tell. He has only the caller's screenshot.

No German ruling on a printed shirt surfaced in this research, neither for nor against the exclusion. Nothing on this page is legal advice.

So in Germany two readings compete over one paragraph. South of the border the paragraph is missing.

Swiss law: a list without online shops

Swiss law knows a right of withdrawal. It attaches to situations, not to distance selling. Art. 40b of the Obligationenrecht lists them: an offer at the workplace, in living space, on the street, in public transport and by telephone.

An online order is not on that list. The Swiss federal SME portal states it plainly: "Das Schweizer Recht sieht für den Online-Handel keine Rücknahmefrist oder ein anderes Rückgaberecht vor". No return period, no other return right.

So for a printed shirt the Swiss returns rule is entirely the club's own. No statute compels it, none limits it. Again, this is not legal advice.

A shop that writes its own rule rarely writes it from scratch. What ends up on the page often carries a German word.

A German word in Thun

The FC Thun fan shop publishes a page titled "Widerrufsrecht", the German-law term for the right of withdrawal, and its imprint names FC Thun AG as the operator. The page grants ten days and excludes "Personalisierte Trikots/Shirts (z. B. mit Namen, Nummern oder individuellen Aufdrucken)". It names no statute.

In substance that is the voluntary rule Swiss law leaves to the shop. Only the heading comes from German law.

It turns operational the moment a customer in Freiburg im Breisgau opens the same page. That customer reads the imported word against a statute the page never meant, and the page no longer decides which regime governs the order.

Sooner or later a customer like that calls someone like Luca.

On the phone, proof counts

In Germany the dispute runs into whether the exclusion holds for that order. In Switzerland it runs straight into a goodwill decision. Either way Luca has a few minutes for one question: what did the customer order, in which version, when?

On one side lies the caller's screenshot, on the other a memory of a catalog that has moved on. Two regimes, and neither supplies the proof. No clause in the shop closes that gap. It closes only where the single order is on record. But which law governs that order?

What IPRG and Rome I say

The shop's footer does not decide which rule governs a single order. Both regimes attach to where the consumer lives.

Art. 120(1) of the Swiss IPRG subjects everyday consumer contracts to the law of the consumer's habitual residence. Paragraph 2 is one sentence: "Eine Rechtswahl ist ausgeschlossen." A choice of law is excluded.

The EU side is parallel. Article 6(1) of the Rome I Regulation (EC) No 593/2008 applies the law of the consumer's habitual residence where the trader "directs" its activity there. A choice of law may not "have the result of depriving the consumer of the protection" that law gives.

For a merchandising operation the returns rule is a property of the order, not of the shop. Ship from Bern to Konstanz and from Dortmund to Zürich, and one product page has two answers.

Then the proof has to sit with the order too. That is where kit.ink starts.

When a supporter adds the shirt to the cart, kit.ink fixes which shirt, in which edition, was ordered. With it the size, the name, the number, the images and the lettering. The fixed record does not change, even when the catalog moves on.

The limits belong right beside that. kit.ink fixes the input. How faithfully a later print reproduces it is a separate question. What the norms mean for a given storefront belongs with its own counsel. We describe the norms here; we do not apply them.

So the version is settled. What happened to it since is not.

A timeline, not a memory

The second question follows at once. Who touched the order, who decided it where a person decided, and what did production see?

For now, Luca has the order history and the memory of the colleague on duty that Friday. For a goodwill call that is often enough. For a dispute with a deadline and a fantasy name it rarely is.

One timeline per personalization records every station the shirt passed, every attempt that was refused, every retrieval by another system, allowed or denied, and who acted. It never records the name on the shirt. What the shirt said is proved by the fixed record.

Production sees a shirt only once it is released; while it is being checked or on hold, production receives nothing. After release it gets a finished package of four things:

• the print artwork of each decorated view at true size
• a dimensioned drawing in millimeters
• an A4 print instruction in the club's language
• a machine-readable file with checksums

On the phone it is then no longer memory against a screenshot.

The limit belongs here too. The timeline is a log, not a retention rule. The deletion policy stays the club's. The timeline says nothing about whether the exclusion holds in a dispute. That question stays with the court.

And what does it mean for checkout and refunds?

Checkout and refunds stay where they are

The shop system knows the order number, the item and the amount, but not the name as it was ordered. Close that gap with a system that also takes over refunds and customer email, and you trade an evidence gap for a process gap.

So checkout, payment, refunds, customer communication and the print partner stay exactly where they are. kit.ink owns the fixed design, its history and the print documents. Nothing else.

For Luca one step changes. He looks up what was recorded instead of reconstructing it. Everything after is unchanged: same screen, same refund process, same email.

This has an edge too. The fixed record proves what was ordered. Whether the shirt comes back is still the club's call, against its own terms in Germany and its own goodwill in Switzerland.

What Swiss shops offer today sits in the article on the Swiss market. A nameset dispute in practice sits in the article on one wrong nameset.

Which leaves Luca's callback.

Two countries, one piece of evidence

In the afternoon Luca calls back. The sentence on his screen ends a conversation only until someone asks, and his caller asked. In both countries the argument turns on who can prove what was ordered, and the shop's footer decides nothing.

One shirt, one name, one order: the version behind that order carries one storefront through two regimes.

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Operators who want to review their own returns handling for personalized goods can start with a short, no-pressure conversation about their own workflow.

All cited pages were accessed on August 6, 2026, except the FC Bayern München and Eintracht Frankfurt pages (August 5, 2026) and § 312g BGB (September 22, 2026).