How to Reduce Fake COD Orders

Cash on delivery exists because it removes the biggest trust barrier in online selling: a stranger paying a stranger before seeing the product. That same trust gap is what a small number of buyers exploit — ordering on impulse and refusing at the door, placing a joke order with a friend's number, or a competitor testing your stock and pricing. Removing COD isn't the fix; most of your real customers won't buy without it. The fix is making fake orders cost more effort than they're worth, without adding friction for genuine buyers.

Call to confirm — but only where it matters

Calling every single order to confirm doesn't scale once you're past a handful of orders a day, and most of your regulars don't need it. Reserve the confirmation call for the orders that actually carry risk: a first-time buyer, an order above your usual ticket size, or an address outside the areas you normally deliver to. A thirty-second call catches most fake orders before a rider is ever dispatched.

Keep your own blocklist, and actually check it

Every seller who's shipped a few hundred orders has a mental list of numbers that never accept delivery. The problem is it stays mental — scattered across memory and old chat threads instead of somewhere every order gets checked against. A single running list of phone numbers with a history of refusal, checked before dispatch, stops the same person from costing you a courier fee twice.

Ask for a small advance on your highest-risk orders

You don't need to make every order pay upfront to filter out the ones that aren't serious — a small, refundable advance (even ৳50–100) on unusually large orders or from brand-new customers weeds out impulse and prank orders almost entirely, because a genuine buyer rarely objects to it and someone who never intended to receive the parcel usually disappears the moment you ask.

Cap how much you'll ship COD without any payment at all

Set a maximum order value above which COD alone isn't accepted — beyond that, require at least a partial online payment. This protects you from the highest-cost failures (a refused ৳5,000 order costs far more in courier fees and lost stock time than a refused ৳500 one) without touching the low-ticket orders that make up most of your volume.

None of this brings fake orders to zero — some level of refusal is a normal cost of running COD, not a failure. The goal is keeping it to the small, predictable percentage it should be, instead of letting it quietly eat into a margin you worked hard for.