Analyses of the EU Consumer Rights Directive have often been implicit normative from the viewpoint of the consumer. Such approaches neglect the effective functioning of the regime installed by the Directive, its regulatory quality. This paper presents a framework to investigate regulatory quality combining theoretical insights from both economics, law and political science with a range of interviews with regulatory actors. From this follows three indicators of quality: legal coherence, the interpretative field, and applicability. Elaborating and applying this theoretical machinery to analyse the Consumer Rights Directive leads to the conclusion that especially the new rules on the right to withdrawal have some challenges on several of the indicators of regulatory quality. These challenges might even be so grave so as to undermine businesses’ incentives to engage in cross-border trading and international e-commerce – despite the Directive’s intention to foster exactly such trading.