Consumer rights in Bulgaria: guarantee and returns

Everyday life · Last reviewed: 2026-08-24

A legal guarantee and a commercial guarantee are not the same

The two-year guarantee card handed to you in a shop is most often a copy of a right you already hold by law. The legal guarantee arises from statute, does not depend on the trader granting it, and the absence of a document does not remove it. A commercial guarantee is a promise: the trader or manufacturer adds something ON TOP of what the law gives, such as a longer term, on-site service, free carriage or direct replacement. If it adds nothing, it has in truth given nothing.

The practical importance of the distinction: when a trader says the commercial guarantee has expired, the legal one may still be running. Likewise, restrictions in a commercial guarantee card of the sort declaring it void in certain cases do not narrow the legal guarantee. The sentence to use in a claim under the legal guarantee is therefore plain: your claim rests not on the commercial guarantee but on the non-conformity provisions of consumer legislation.

A third concept is the one most often muddled: returns. Giving something back because you did not like it is NOT a statutory right for purchases made in a shop; a shop may accept it under its own policy or may refuse. For purchases made online or away from business premises the position is different, and there a genuine right of withdrawal exists. Faulty goods and a change of mind are two separate legal worlds.

What the two-year legal guarantee covers

According to the Consumer Protection Commission's explanation, all products carry a legal guarantee of two years from receipt, and within that period the appearance of a non-conformity or defect gives rise to your right to complain. The key concept is non-conformity: the goods need not have broken. Missing a promised feature, working differently from how it was advertised, arriving with a part missing or coming with wrong installation instructions all count as non-conformity.

The period runs from RECEIPT of the goods, not from the date of the order. That distinction matters especially for items with long lead times such as furniture, white goods and made-to-order pieces. The document showing the delivery date is therefore valuable: a delivery note, a courier record or an installation protocol. If you have none of them, the proof of purchase is the next best evidence.

The legal guarantee does not cover normal wear or user error; it covers non-conformity arising from the goods themselves. The boundary is contestable, and who carries the dispute matters: where it is claimed that the non-conformity is MINOR, the burden of proof lies with the seller. Saying it is a small thing is not, by itself, a defence; the seller has to show it.

How a complaint is filed

According to the commission's guidance, a complaint is filed with the TRADER from whom the goods were bought, and it may be made orally or in writing. The law recognises an oral complaint, but in practice writing is almost always the right choice: an oral complaint cannot be proved when someone later says you never approached them. A written complaint can be made on the shop's own form, by email, or by a signed letter handed in.

The information a complaint should carry is this: who you are and how to reach you, which product you mean, when and where it was bought, what the problem is and what you are asking for. The last item is the one most often left out. Saying something is broken is not a request; asking for it to be repaired, or asking for a replacement, is a request, and that is what the trader owes an answer to.

The question of the latest possible date also has a clear answer: where a defect appears, the law gives a right to complain for up to two years from the date of purchase. While you remain inside that two-year window, a defence that you are too late has no basis. Keeping a record of the filing date therefore matters: the send time of an email, or the reference number given for a letter handed in, does the job.

The trader's 30-day deadline

According to the commission's guidance, the trader is obliged to answer within THIRTY DAYS whether it accepts the complaint as justified and, if so, how it intends to satisfy it. That deadline is the most concrete measure of time a consumer holds: thirty days of silence is by itself an indicator of breach and the fact that goes first in any subsequent complaint to the authority.

For the thirty days to start running, the complaint must have REACHED the trader. Leaving a trace that it arrived is therefore critical: a record of a sent email, a reference number from the shop, or a delivery confirmation for a parcel. Saying you called and nobody cared does not create that trace.

When an answer arrives there are two possibilities. If the trader accepts the complaint as justified, it writes how it will satisfy it and from that point the argument shifts to the kind and timing of the remedy. If it does not accept it, it writes its reasons, and those reasons become the core of the file you take to the next level. In either case, keep the answer: a rejected complaint is far more useful than a lost one.

Which remedy you can ask for: the order and its exceptions

Where goods do not conform to requirements, remedies follow an order. At the first step the choice is yours: when asking the seller to bring the goods into conformity you may choose between REPAIR and REPLACEMENT, unless that is impossible or would result in disproportionately high costs for the seller. A trader saying it only does repairs is therefore not on its own a valid answer; impossibility or disproportion has to be shown.

The second step opens where the first fails. If the seller HAS NOT carried out repair or replacement, or has REFUSED to bring the goods into conformity, and the non-conformity is serious enough to justify it, you may immediately obtain a price reduction or terminate the contract of sale. The word immediately matters: at that stage you are not obliged to accept a third repair attempt.

Termination has a limit: where the non-conformity is MINOR the consumer has no right to terminate. But that limit is not set against the consumer, because the burden of proving that it is minor lies with the SELLER. In practice this means that if the seller says a scratch is trivial, it must demonstrate that; you are not obliged to prove it mattered to you.

On termination, the trader is obliged to refund all sums paid under the contract WITHOUT UNDUE DELAY. That phrase names no calendar day but sets a standard of conduct: a refund cannot be stretched over months to suit the trader's internal accounting cycle. A delayed refund is itself a fresh ground for complaint.

Buying online: the 14-day right of withdrawal

In a distance contract, meaning a purchase made online or by telephone, you have a right of withdrawal even where the goods have no defect at all. According to the commission's guidance, the deadline for exercising the right of withdrawal from a distance contract is 14 DAYS from receiving the goods. This is the change-of-mind right and it requires no reason to be given.

On procedure, the commission's warning is explicit: BEFORE returning the goods you must inform the trader of your intention to withdraw, and it is recommended that this be in writing, because telephone conversations are hard to prove. The order is therefore: notify first, send second. A parcel sent without notification leaves the door open for the trader to say no such request was ever received.

Who bears the cost of return on withdrawal depends on whether the trader informed you in advance, which is why the most useful text to read before ordering is the returns and withdrawal page. It also carries the return address, the deadline and when the money comes back. Saving those three pieces of information with a screenshot before you order is the simplest protection against page text that changes later.

Purchases away from business premises

Traders calling at the door, presentations in hotel function rooms, sales events reached through the promise of a free excursion and contracts signed in the street form a separate category: purchases away from business premises. The category targets situations where the consumer's ability to compare shrinks and psychological pressure rises, and it therefore carries extra protection. The Consumer Protection Commission publishes separate guidance on it.

The most common harm in such sales comes from expensive household appliances, mattresses, cookware sets or products sold as health devices, usually signed alongside a consumer credit agreement. The two contracts being linked complicates matters, because someone withdrawing from the sale must also terminate the credit agreement separately. Since reading documents on a doorstep is hard, the most practical defence is not signing on the spot.

In households with elderly relatives the risk is particularly high. The target group in such sales is often people who are home alone, struggle to read the contract and believe there is no way to give it back. One family rule is enough: nothing gets signed on the same day with anyone who comes to the door. That rule removes even the need to exercise the statutory right of withdrawal.

Price, label and the difference at the till

The most frequent everyday dispute is a difference between the shelf price and the price read at the till. The right move is to point out the difference THE MOMENT you notice it at the till: the assistant checks the shelf label and the problem usually ends there. Returning after leaving the shop is always possible, but the burden of proof grows; reading the receipt before leaving the till is a good habit.

Discount campaigns hold a second trap: the amount shown as the old price must genuinely have been applied. A discount created by striking through a price at which nothing was ever sold is a misleading commercial practice and falls within consumer supervision. A screenshot or a photograph is the only workable evidence for such claims; when a campaign ends the page changes and no trace remains.

There are also cases with no price shown at all. An unlabelled item breaches the consumer's right to information; asking the seller and receiving an answer is your right, while guessing is not your obligation. The same logic applies to services: asking the price before work begins where no price list is visible is always cheaper than arguing afterwards.

Second-hand goods, display items and digital content

The belief that buying at a discount means having no rights is widespread and wrong. A low price does not stop rights arising on non-conformity; the only thing that does is the defect having been EXPRESSLY DISCLOSED at the point of sale. No claim can later be made about the scratched screen of a phone sold with the words that the screen is scratched and that is why it is cheap, but if the battery of that same phone swells three months later, that is not the disclosed defect and the right remains.

The same logic applies to display items: once it is disclosed that they have been used, the price reflects that, but a hidden fault is still a non-conformity. When buying a discounted or display item it is therefore worth asking for the REASON for the discount to be written on the sales document: the trader then does not later say the buyer objects to everything, and the buyer knows what they accepted.

Digital content and digital services are a separate heading: a downloaded game, a cloud subscription or a software licence are not non-returnable in the way a physical good can be. The right of withdrawal may be restricted for unsealed media and for content whose use began with a download, but content that does not do what was promised is still a non-conformity. Subscriptions raise a second issue: automatic renewal. The renewal terms and the cancellation procedure have to be written into the contract; telling someone to phone to cancel while the line is permanently busy is an obstacle, not a solution.

If nothing comes of it: the next step

If correspondence with the trader produces nothing, the road does not end. The Consumer Protection Commission both supervises and mediates in dispute resolution, and there is a defined procedure for approaching it. Other competent bodies also come into play depending on the sector: the energy and water regulator for energy and water services, the communications regulator for electronic communications and postal services. The answer to where you complain depends on the type of service, not on who the trader is.

The file you need at the next step is well defined, and the steps described here already produce it: proof of purchase, the written complaint, evidence of filing, the trader's answer or the thirty days that passed without one, and visual evidence of the defect. When those five pieces come together, your submission stops being a grumble and becomes a case file, and a case file is what institutions can work with.

The evidence file: a five-minute habit

• •Photograph the receipt on every expensive purchase; thermal paper fades within months and becomes unreadable.
• •For items needing installation, photograph the device and its serial number on installation day.
• •Keep all correspondence with the trader in one folder; an email chain is the strongest chronology.
• •When a problem appears, record first and write second: video and photographs convince more than a described defect.
• •Note in your calendar the day you filed the complaint; the thirty days count from then.

The seller has closed, gone insolvent or simply vanished

Everything described so far rested on one assumption: that there is a counterparty. The hardest situation in consumer law is precisely the one in which there is not — the shop has closed, the website is down, the phone rings out. The first rule has to be said with painful clarity: the addressee of the two-year STATUTORY GUARANTEE is the SELLER, not the producer. So when the seller vanishes the right formally survives, but the door through which it is exercised has shut. The task here is therefore not to knock harder on the same door but to look for OTHER doors.

The first other door is the commercial guarantee. According to the guidance of the Commission for Consumer Protection, a trader MAY provide a commercial guarantee but is not obliged to; and where one is given, the trader sets the conditions and the procedure for using it. The same guidance contains one further key sentence: when a defect is discovered, the consumer may CHOOSE between relying on the statutory guarantee and relying on the commercial guarantee. The life-saving detail is this — a commercial guarantee is very often given not by the shop but by the PRODUCER or the IMPORTER. If the shop is gone and the producer is still trading, the guarantee card in the box is a living door. So do not throw away the guarantee card and the information leaflet from the box: your two-year statutory right does NOT depend on that paper, but when the seller disappears it may be the only concrete contract you have left.

The second step is to find out who you are actually dealing with. Every trader in Bulgaria has a unified identification code (ЕИК), and that code must appear on the receipt, on the invoice and on the website. With it in hand, the Commercial Register kept by the Registry Agency will tell you the company's current STATUS. Among the register's own search tools are a listing of persons in liquidation and a search of announcements concerning insolvency. Five minutes there says what a month of unanswered emails does not: is this company merely silent, in liquidation, in insolvency, or struck off? The decision you take depends entirely on that answer.

If insolvency proceedings have been opened, the rules of the game change. You no longer write to the trader; you REGISTER your claim in the insolvency proceedings, within the period laid down by law and with the trustee. Sobriety is required here: an ordinary consumer claim is unsecured, and recovery is often partial or nil. That fact yields two practical conclusions. The first is speed: a claim not registered in time does not even enter the queue. The second is choice: purchases with long delivery times, made-to-order goods and prepayment are the pattern in which seller risk is most concentrated — and that risk is not offset by a lower price.

Online marketplaces add a further layer, and most people never read exactly that line in the order confirmation: is the platform the SELLER, or is it an INTERMEDIARY hosting third-party sellers? That single line decides whom the statutory guarantee binds. Marketplace „buyer protection“ programmes are useful too, but legally they are something different: they are not statutory rights but the platform's own CONTRACTUAL undertakings. They usually work well, yet they have their own deadlines, those deadlines run from the delivery date, and they close long before the day your patience finally runs out.

Prevention is the only real solution on this subject. Spend the five minutes in the register before prepaying, before ordering something made to measure and before accepting a long delivery time. In choosing how to pay, prefer an instrument that leaves a route independent of the seller (a card) over a plain bank transfer. And keep the ЕИК, the order confirmation, the payment document and the promised delivery date together in one folder. If the seller really does disappear, what decides whether anything can be done is not your anger but that folder. The institutional information in this section was collected on 24 August 2026; confirm the current position on the official pages in the sources section.

How to verify this today

1. 1

   Find the delivery date of the problem item

   The two-year legal guarantee runs from receipt. The delivery date governs, not the order date.
2. 2

   File the complaint with the trader in writing

   Who you are, which item, when it was bought, what the problem is and what you want. A complaint with no request invites no answer.
3. 3

   Mark the thirty days in your calendar

   The trader must answer within thirty days whether it accepts the complaint as justified and how it will satisfy it.
4. 4

   If the answer is negative, keep the reasons

   The reason for refusal is the file for the next step. Ask for a written refusal rather than an oral one.
5. 5

   For an online purchase, notify first and send second

   The withdrawal period is 14 days from receipt and the intention must be notified before you return the goods; writing is recommended.

Frequently asked questions

Related topics