What cash on delivery costs

How often cash parcels come back compared with prepaid ones, and what those returns cost you.

User guide

These guides describe implemented workflows. You still need an account and access to the product; individual features can have separate requirements.

Where: Dashboard, Analytics

Cash on delivery and prepaid sit side by side on your Analytics page: how many orders of each have settled, how many came back, and what share that is. Two figures next to each other is the whole point. Cash costing you more than prepaid is something you can act on. Both costing the same is a different problem with a different fix, and the card is built so you can tell which one you have.

To see it in rupees rather than percentages, tell us what one returned parcel costs you. There is a box for it under your delivery rates in Settings.

Put in freight out, freight back and your handling, for one parcel. Your courier's sheet usually calls it an RTO charge.
It is your cost. No customer sees it and no customer pays it.
One number for the whole shop.
Leave it blank and the page still works. You get the percentages and not the rupees.

Before you continue

An order you cancelled before dispatch does not count as a parcel coming back, because nothing travelled and your courier charged you nothing. Those stay on your orders page as cancellations and are left out of this figure deliberately. Counting them here would make cash on delivery look worse than it is, and the number would stop being one you could act on.

A new shop sees very little here, and that is the page working rather than failing. Each side needs about twenty settled orders of its own before it will state a percentage; under that it shows you the counts and says they are too few to be a rate. Twenty cash orders beside two hundred prepaid ones still means no cash percentage, because the cash side is what a cash percentage is worked out from.

The rupee figure has no such floor. Two parcels at three hundred rupees is six hundred rupees whether you have four settled orders or four hundred, so you are shown it either way. An order still in flight counts on neither side until it settles, which is what stops every figure here drifting through the week with nothing having actually happened.

Below the two figures, a second card names where cash on delivery is actually costing you: the pincodes, the customers and the products behind the parcels that came back. Nothing here is a percentage — each row is an exact count, or an exact rupee figure once you have set your cost, so a single pincode with two failures does not need twenty orders behind it before it is worth showing you.

Pincodes and customers show what those failures cost you, next to the count.
Products show only the count — an order can carry more than one product, so there is no honest way to split a parcel's freight between them.
Only pincodes, customers and products that have actually failed at least once appear. A perfect record is not shown, because it is not somewhere to look.
The eight worst of each are shown. A shop with a longer list of trouble spots has a bigger problem than eight more rows would fix.

When one pincode has failed twice or more, it also shows up on your Overview, in Worth a look. It names the address, the count, and the money once you have set your cost — the same card format as everything else on that page, so it sits alongside your other findings rather than in a separate place you have to remember to check.

This page is what already happened. Before you dispatch (in Orders) is the other half: the same kind of history read on the order you are about to pack, before it has a chance to add to these figures.