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Cash on Delivery & Partial COD

COD is where Indian D2C loses money to returns. IndiSell gives you graded control instead of an all-or-nothing switch.

Cash on Delivery drives conversion in India but also drives RTO (return-to-origin) — parcels that come back undelivered, costing you shipping both ways plus blocked stock. IndiSell's answer is graded control, not a blunt on/off switch.

The three COD actions

Every COD decision resolves to one of three outcomes, weakest to strongest:

Allow COD

Plain Cash on Delivery is offered normally.

Partial COD

Plain COD is withdrawn; the shopper pays a small advance online and the rest on delivery.

Block COD

No COD at all — prepaid only.

Partial COD

Partial COD sits between a prepaid discount and a COD block: the shopper pays a token advance online, which makes them committed enough to open the door, while keeping the comfort of paying the rest in cash. You set the advance as a flat amount or a percentage, optionally tiered by cart value.

It's the highest-leverage middle ground — most orders never see the advance, and the ones that do are exactly the risky ones.

Where COD decisions come from

The allow/partial/block outcome is decided per order by your Smart COD rules — risk score bands, pincode rules, same-day caps, order-value caps, and the outside-India rule. This page is the what; Smart COD is the how.

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The cheapest RTO is the one that never happened. Pair a small prepaid incentive (see Offers) with graded COD and you'll shift a real share of orders to prepaid without losing the COD-only shopper.