In COD, a sale isn't a sale until the parcel is delivered and paid for. The delivery rate is the judge of your whole chain: it turns (or doesn't) your orders into real money. Its enemy has a name — RTO, those parcels that come back without ever being delivered. This guide explains what a return really costs, why parcels come back, and the concrete levers to deliver more.
What is the delivery rate (and RTO)?
The delivery rate is the share of your shipped orders that actually reach the customer and get paid: delivered orders ÷ shipped orders. Its mirror is RTO (Return to Origin) — the parcels that come back to you without being delivered. This rate decides your delivered revenue, the only revenue that pays your bills.
Don't confuse it with the confirmation rate: confirmation filters orders before shipping, delivery is measured after. Confirmation feeds delivery, but it isn't enough: a confirmed order can still come back if the carrier misses the delivery or the customer backs out at the door.
That's why the delivery rate is the true judge. For a concrete benchmark: merchants going through UpConfirm reach up to an 87% delivery rate. Every point gained here is more cash and one less return.
What a return (RTO) really costs you
A return costs you shipping twice (out and back), handling, stock tied up for the whole trip, and sometimes a product that comes back damaged or unsellable — all with no revenue to offset it. The most expensive order in your business is the one that comes back.
The trap is to reason on ordered revenue. Your profit isn't calculated on received orders, but on delivered revenue. A few too many returns are enough to eat the margin of the orders that did arrive: you've sold a lot, but you earn little. It's the mistake that sinks stores that look like they're "crushing it".
Why parcels come back
A parcel comes back for five main reasons: customer unreachable or absent at the attempts, wrong or incomplete address, refusal at the door (regret, no more cash, delivery time too long), fake order, or a product judged not to match what the customer expected.
- Unreachable or absent customer — the courier comes by, no one answers. After a few attempts, the parcel goes back.
- Wrong or incomplete address — unfindable, wrong neighborhood, no landmark. The courier can't deliver.
- Refusal at the door — the customer changed their mind, no longer has the cash, or found the delivery time too long and ordered elsewhere.
- Fake order — bogus number, made-up address. It should never have been shipped.
- Product not matching expectations — the item doesn't match what the customer imagined (size, color, quality), they refuse it.
Good news: most of these causes can be addressed, at two distinct moments — before shipping (filter fragile orders) and after (deliver well, track, follow up). The next sections take both.
Filtering upstream: confirmation + customer scoring
The first anti-return lever acts before you even ship: seriously confirm every order (customer reached, address validated) and spot risky customers from their history. You don't ship an order you haven't confirmed, and you're wary of profiles piling up fake orders and returns.
Confirmation already weeds out a large share of parcels doomed to return: a corrected address, a customer who says "yes" again, that's a far more likely delivery. It's the most profitable filter in the whole chain.
The second filter is customer scoring: rating each customer on their past behavior (delivered, refused, fake orders) so you don't re-ship blind to a profile that has already cost you returns. Spotting a risky customer before committing to shipping means avoiding an RTO instead of absorbing it.
Choosing and steering your delivery company
The second lever is the carrier. Judge it on four points: its coverage (cities and areas served), its real delivery rate (number of attempts, persistence), its cash-remittance speed, and the quality of its tracking — not just the price per parcel.
- Coverage
- The areas actually served, including the harder ones. A carrier that doesn't cover your customer base mechanically generates returns.
- Real delivery rate
- The number of attempts and the tenacity on absent customers — that's what decides how many of your parcels actually arrive.
- Remittance speed
- How often, and how reliably, it remits the collected cash to you. Your money stuck with it is your cash flow on hold.
- Tracking and returns
- The quality of tracking and how returns are managed. Without visibility, you can neither follow up nor understand where it stalls.
Beware the "cheapest": a cheap carrier with a poor delivery rate costs you more in RTO than it saves you on the rate. The right benchmark is the cost per delivered order, not per shipped parcel. Many merchants actually work with several carriers by area — UpConfirm automatically sends orders to around fifteen Moroccan delivery companies, with no re-entry.
Track and follow up every parcel
A shipped parcel isn't a delivered parcel. The third lever is tracking: keeping an eye on every shipment, following up with the customer before delivery fails, and handling second and third attempts. A stalled parcel rescued in time is an RTO avoided.
- Track the status of every parcel in real time, not only at the end of the cycle.
- Follow up with the customer before the delivery attempt ("your parcel arrives today, be reachable") — a simple reminder saves deliveries.
- Handle stalled parcels: unreachable customer, missed attempt, address to clarify — each rescued case is a saved sale.
- Manage returns cleanly to get stock back in circulation fast.
Doing all this by hand across hundreds of parcels is impossible — that's where a shipping dashboard that centralizes tracking, follow-ups and returns changes the delivery rate.
Measure: delivery rate and RTO, by city and carrier
What isn't measured doesn't improve. Track your delivery rate and your return rate every week, and above all break them down by city and by carrier: that's how you spot where returns concentrate and act in the right place, instead of enduring a global average.
- Delivery rate = delivered ÷ shipped. To push up — an attainable benchmark: up to 87% among UpConfirm merchants.
- Return rate (RTO) = returned ÷ shipped. To push down: it's burned margin.
- By city and by carrier — a city or carrier dragging down your average can be addressed (another carrier on the area, reinforced confirmation…).
The delivery rate is the third of the four metrics that decide your COD profitability. Pushing it up directly means more delivered revenue — and that's where the difference plays out between a store that sells and a store that makes money.