/ Why this matters
Cash on delivery is an intention, not a sale.
COD is the default in Indian ecommerce and it comes with a structural problem: at the moment of ordering, the customer has committed nothing. No card, no payment, no friction — and therefore no commitment. The order does not get cancelled. It gets forgotten, by them and by you, until a delivery agent turns up to a refusal.
- India's average ecommerce RTO rate runs 25–35%, against a global benchmark of roughly 8–12%.
- Split by payment type, the gap is starker: 28–35% for COD versus 4–8% for prepaid.
- COD accounts for roughly 65% of Indian orders, so the COD rate largely is the overall rate.
- Bad or incomplete addresses are the single largest driver; impulsive low-intent COD orders are second.
- Automated confirmation messages sent within 1–5 minutes of the order are consistently reported as one of the higher-impact interventions available.
Sources: Indian D2C logistics and RTO-reduction industry guides, 2026. These are sector-wide third-party figures, not Launch7 client results, and not a promise about your store. Vendors quoting specific recovery percentages are usually quoting their own marketing.
An order confirmed at 9:20 PM is usually a sale. The same order confirmed at 11 AM the next day is a coin flip.
What it costs you now
- A COD order lands at 9 PM. Nobody confirms it. By morning they have changed their mind.
- A cart sits full for three days. No message ever goes out.
- You pay shipping both ways on a parcel that was never really sold.
- The customer who bought twice last year has not heard from you since.
What changes
- Every unconfirmed order gets a WhatsApp message within twenty minutes.
- Abandoned carts get one follow-up, then one reminder. Never more.
- Cancelling is made easy on purpose — a cancel now costs nothing, a refusal at the door costs you twice.
- A monthly list of what was recovered, what cancelled early, and what was never answered at all.
/ Watch it work
The orders that were already yours.
Unconfirmed COD chased before it goes cold, one abandoned cart followed up once — and the one that gets flagged instead of chased a third time.
Illustration, not a live feed, and the rupee figures are made up. Scene one: three cash-on-delivery orders sitting unconfirmed for 22, 31 and 44 minutes; two are confirmed by reply and the third is flagged for a human after two unanswered chases rather than chased again. Scene two: a cart abandoned at checkout, followed up once an hour later with a stock cue, answered, and recovered.
/ How it works
The confirmation ladder, and where it stops.
- +20 minutes
- A message restating exactly what they bought — item, colour, size, amount. This alone catches genuine mistakes before they become refusals.
- One tap
- Confirm or cancel. Not a form, not a call, not "reply YES in capitals".
- Next morning
- If nothing came back, one more message. Then it stops.
- Carts
- One message inside the hour, one reminder a day later, then the customer is left alone.
- Never
- No third chase, no fourth. Five messages is how you get your number reported.
- Report
- Monthly: chased, confirmed, cancelled early, never answered. The last group is where the real problem lives, and a recovery percentage hides it.
/ What it's worth
Your numbers, not ours.
Set the share that never gets confirmed to what you actually see in your dashboard — we do not assume a rate for you.
Turn on JavaScript to use the calculator.
This is arithmetic on the numbers you just entered — not a result we're claiming. It shows what is sitting in unconfirmed orders, not what we would recover. We have not published a recovery rate, and will not until we have enough real campaigns to average honestly.
/ Read deeper
Field note Why unconfirmed COD orders die, and the message that saves them 6 min read/ Before you ask
Questions people actually ask.
How many times will it chase?
Doesn't making cancelling easy lose me sales?
Which platforms does it read?
Can it convert COD to prepaid?
/ The other agents
They hand off to each other.
Six specialists, one system, and none of them named after the model they run on — because that part gets replaced, repeatedly, and what they do for your business does not change when it does. Moving you onto the better one is the monthly Run’s job, not yours.
See where Revenue Recovery would pay for itself.
Tell us where to look and we'll send back sixty seconds showing the three places orders are slipping. No call required, back within 48 hours.
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