Article

Cash on Delivery in India: How It Works, Why It Dominates, and How to Manage RTO

Razorpay · Razorpay Blog Free Beginner India

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.

  • COD drives roughly 60-65% of Indian e-commerce orders
  • COD carries far higher RTO risk than prepaid
  • Manage COD with controls and conversion rather than removing it
Open on razorpay.com ↗

It answers 2 questions

  1. What is RTO and why is it quietly killing my D2C margins?
  2. Should I even offer COD, or just go prepaid-only?

Read with it

  1. The cleanest India-specific primer on what RTO is and why it hurts, from the checkout company that sees 180M+ shoppers, it... GoKwik Blog Article What Is Return To Origin (RTO) In eCommerce? All You Need To Know GoKwik
  2. A practical, diagnose-then-fix playbook that insists you find your top RTO cause before throwing tools at it, the most useful... GoKwik Blog Article How to Reduce RTO in E-commerce: A Complete Guide for Indian D2C Brands GoKwik
  3. Maps RTO back to its root causes, bad addresses, unavailable customers, damage, wrong items, post-ship cancellations, so you... Shiprocket Blog Article How to Reduce RTO in eCommerce: Causes & Solutions Shiprocket
  4. Covers the newer 'RTO insurance' category (e.g. Shiprocket RevProtect) that reimburses a slice of order value on RTO/delays,... Shiprocket Blog Article How RTO Protection Services Reduce E-Commerce Revenue Loss Shiprocket
  5. A data-backed benchmark from 410M+ shipments across 6,000+ brands, the closest thing to an industry yardstick for where your... Unicommerce Report India D2C Report 2026: Operations, RTO & Growth Data Unicommerce
  6. A founder-facing feature that captures the strategic tension well, COD can drive 3-4x growth for early brands but pushes RTO to... Inc42 Article Early Stage D2C Brands Can Scale Faster And Profitably With Kwik COD: GoKwik's Vineeta Vora Inc42
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →