Going prepaid-only is the cleanest way to kill RTO, but in India it can also kill 40-60% of your orders, COD still drives roughly half of D2C demand and is often what lets an early brand scale 3-4x. The smarter play for most brands is not to remove COD but to control it: keep COD available, block genuinely high-risk orders, and aggressively nudge the rest to prepaid. Only go fully prepaid-only if your product is high-AOV, your customer skews metro/urban, or your RTO losses are so severe that shrinking order volume is worth the peace of mind.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
4 resources4 India-specific4 link-checked
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📄 Article
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Why we picked it
A balanced take on the central strategic question, why COD dominates ~60-65% of Indian orders, the RTO risk it carries, and why the answer is to manage COD rather than abolish it. Good decision-framing for the 'should I offer COD' debate.
Why we picked it
A founder-facing feature that captures the strategic tension well, COD can drive 3-4x growth for early brands but pushes RTO to 30-40%, so the game is enabling COD while controlling its downside. Good context on why the whole COD-tooling category exists.
Why we picked it
A practical, diagnose-then-fix playbook that insists you find your top RTO cause before throwing tools at it, the most useful mindset in the whole topic, and it's written for Indian COD reality rather than generic global e-commerce.
Why we picked it
Maps RTO back to its root causes, bad addresses, unavailable customers, damage, wrong items, post-ship cancellations, so you can match the fix to the actual failure instead of guessing. Good foundational read for a new founder.
