How to reduce RTO and stop fake COD orders before they ship.
Every parcel that comes back costs you the shipping both ways, the packaging, and two weeks of a product you couldn't sell. For a store doing cash on delivery, RTO is the single biggest leak — and it is mostly preventable, because most returns are decided before the parcel ships: a wrong number, a prank order, a buyer who never meant it. Here is the playbook, cheapest lever first.
Know your number first
RTO rate = parcels returned ÷ parcels shipped, over a month, for COD orders. Under 10% is healthy for a small store; 15–25% is common for stores that ship every COD order blind; above 30% means something structural — a product that gets refused on sight, or a stream of fake orders. Your aggregator's dashboard shows it; so does the order list if you tag returns. Measure before you fix.
Lever 1: make the address form do the work
Most failed deliveries are address problems: no pin code, a landmark-free address in a city of lanes, a phone number with a typo. Make pin code, phone, city and state mandatory at checkout (SitesPlaced does by default), validate the pin code's length, and add a Landmark field. The buyer who types their address into a form makes fewer mistakes than the seller transcribing a voice note.
Lever 2: confirm high-risk orders on WhatsApp
Confirm — don't ship — when the order is above your threshold (₹1,000–1,500 is typical), the number is new, the address is thin, or the cart is odd. One short message with the order number, amount, item and city, asking for a YES. Ship on YES; one reminder after 24 hours; cancel and restock after 48. Sellers who do this consistently report RTO roughly halving, because the buyer who never replies was never going to open the door either.
Automate the message, not the decision
On the Ecommerce plan, WhatsApp Business API alerts send the order confirmation from your own number automatically; your job is reading the replies.
Lever 3: a COD charge, and a reason to prepay
A ₹30–50 COD fee filters casual orders and funds the returns you still get. Pair it with a reason to prepay: free shipping on prepaid, a small PREPAID coupon, or simply saying "prepaid orders ship first". Every order moved from COD to prepaid is an order that cannot RTO for refusal.
Lever 4: work the NDR the same day
When a courier can't deliver, they raise a non-delivery report — buyer not reachable, address incomplete, refused. Aggregators surface these in a queue and give the parcel two or three attempts. The window to act is hours: call or WhatsApp the buyer, fix the address or landmark, and reply to the NDR with the correction. A parcel that sits at the hub unanswered for two days becomes an RTO by default.
Lever 5: block the repeat offenders and the bots
- Block list. A phone number or email that refused a parcel goes on it; the store won't accept their next order. On SitesPlaced: open the order → Block customer.
- Velocity limits. More than a few orders from one phone or address in an hour is a bot or a prank; the store refuses the extra ones. Built into placeOrder on SitesPlaced.
- Honeypots and captcha on the checkout stop the crude scripts. If you get bursts of identical orders at 3 a.m., that's what's hitting you.
Lever 6: 1-click checkouts with RTO scoring
Hosted checkouts from the big logistics and payment players score each COD order against their network history — the phone number's past refusals across thousands of stores — and can block, flag or nudge to prepaid. Sell with Shiprocket (their 1-click checkout) and Razorpay Magic Checkout both do this; on SitesPlaced they are on the Ecommerce plan and run alongside the normal checkout. For a store above a few hundred COD orders a month, the RTO saved usually pays for the plan.
Lever 7: fix the product, not just the process
Some products get refused at the door on sight: the colour is not what the photo suggested, the size is off, the thing is smaller than it looked. If one product has three times the RTO of the rest, the fix is the photo, the description or the size chart — see how to write product descriptions that sell — or making it prepaid-only.
FAQs
What is a good RTO rate for cash on delivery?
Under 10% of COD parcels is healthy for a small store that confirms orders. 15–25% is common for stores that ship every COD order without confirmation.
How do I stop fake orders on my website?
Mandatory phone and pin code, a COD charge, WhatsApp confirmation for orders above a threshold, a block list for numbers that refused before, and per-phone order limits. SitesPlaced has the block list and velocity limits built in.
Should I call every COD customer before shipping?
No — only the risky ones: high value, new number, thin address, odd cart. Calling everyone slows shipping and annoys good buyers. A short WhatsApp message with a YES reply is enough.
What is an NDR and why does it matter?
A non-delivery report — the courier's note that a delivery attempt failed and why. Responding the same day with a fixed address or a confirmation is the difference between a second attempt and a return.
Do 1-click checkouts really reduce RTO?
They score the phone number against network-wide history and can push risky COD orders to prepaid or block them. Sellers with meaningful COD volume see real reductions; Sell with Shiprocket and Razorpay Magic Checkout are both available on the SitesPlaced Ecommerce plan.
The RTO levers, built into the store.
Mandatory address fields, a COD charge, customer blocking and order limits on the free plan; WhatsApp API confirmations and 1-click checkouts with RTO scoring on the Ecommerce plan — free for 14 days on every new account.
Compare the plans →
