COD isn't a payment method, it's a credit line your couriers hold for you. Every delivered COD order is money collected by someone else, owed back on a schedule — and most merchants track it in their heads.
How the COD money actually moves
Customer pays the rider → the courier holds it → remittance lands on the carrier's cycle (commonly T+2 to T+7 depending on carrier and service). Between delivery and remittance, that cash is a receivable — invisible on most dashboards.
Setting it up properly
Enable COD on the order
In Shopify, mark orders COD — Pure Parcel reads the flag and books the shipment as COD automatically.
Confirm the carrier supports COD
Every connected carrier handles cash collection differently — the booking shows the COD amount the rider will collect.
Deliver and wait on the clock
Once delivered, the remittance clock starts — track which shipments are awaiting carrier settlement vs cleared.
Chase exceptions
A delivered-but-unremitted shipment past its T+n window is a dispute waiting to happen — catch it in a ledger, not a memory.
Photo: Gene Brutty / Unsplash
Every Pure Parcel shipment records the COD amount collected — the wallet ledger keeps the receivable visible.
See how →Where COD quietly bleeds
RTO: refused COD orders ship back at your cost — the freight both ways with nothing collected. Shortfalls: carriers remit net of adjustments; a mismatch between collected and remitted is easy to miss without a line-level ledger. COD pays for itself only when both are watched.
The bottom line
Offer COD — India still demands it. But treat 'delivered' and 'settled' as different events, and keep the list of who-owes-you-what in software, not memory.
Ship every courier without leaving your store
Pure Parcel is the multi-courier layer for Indian stores — hyperlocal and national carriers in one booking flow.
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