CODVane – Cash on Delivery Order Verification

If you sell cash on delivery, you already know the problem. You pack the goods, you pay the courier, the customer refuses the parcel at the door, and it comes back to you. You paid both ways and sold nothing.

CODVane looks at every cash-on-delivery order the moment it arrives and gives it a score out of 100, worked out from what your shop already knows.

What it looks at

• Who has refused a delivery before. The strongest signal there is, and the only one based on something that actually happened. You mark a refused delivery once, and every future order from that phone or email is scored higher.
• Whether the phone number can be real. Too short, one digit repeated, or a run of consecutive digits.
• Several orders in a few minutes from the same phone or the same address.
• A large first order from someone who has never taken a delivery from you.
• An address a courier cannot find — two words and no number.
• Throwaway email addresses from services that delete the mailbox after a few minutes.

A customer who has taken delivery from you before gets points back. Your best customers should not be treated like strangers.

Decide who may pay on delivery

Everything here is off until you switch it on.

• Order value — do not offer COD below or above an amount. A tiny order costs more to send twice than it is worth; a very large one is more than you want to risk on a stranger.
• Postcodes — offer COD only where you deliver reliably, or never where you do not. End an entry with a star to cover a whole range, so 12* matches every postcode starting 12.
• Countries — never offer COD to a country you do not want to send unpaid parcels to.
• Particular customers — a list of phone numbers or emails that never get COD. Numbers are matched on the digits, so +8801711111111 and 01711111111 are the same person.
• Anyone who has refused before — optional, and it uses only refusals you recorded yourself.

If cash on delivery is the only payment method your shop offers, none of these apply. Taking away the only way to pay loses you the sale rather than protecting it, so the plugin will not do it.

A cash on delivery fee

A fixed amount or a percentage, added at the checkout like any other fee, to recover what a refused parcel costs you in courier charges. You can waive it above an order value, and — this is the setting worth using — charge it only to customers who have refused a delivery before. Everyone else pays nothing, and the people who have actually cost you money are the ones covering it.

See what it is all costing you

Most shops selling on delivery have no idea what their refusal rate is, which is the number that decides whether any of this is worth doing.

The settings screen opens with it: how many orders were paid on delivery, what share came back refused, how much money that was, and how many were flagged. Over 7, 30 or 90 days, or the last year.

It also shows how many of the orders CODVane flagged really were refused. That number is allowed to look bad: if it is low, the thresholds are too tight for your shop and you are being warned about customers who were perfectly fine. You should be able to see when the plugin is getting it wrong.

Confirming an order costs you nothing

Verifying an order by SMS or an automated call means a paid gateway and a fee for every order. The shops losing the most money to refused deliveries are often the ones least able to absorb that.

CODVane uses WhatsApp’s ordinary click-to-chat link. One button on the order opens WhatsApp on your own phone or desktop, with the message to that customer already written — their name, the order number, the total and the delivery address. No account to connect, no API key, no approval process, nothing to pay.

Nothing leaves your server

There is no outside service, no API key and no account. Every signal is read from the order itself or from orders your shop already has. Your customers’ phone numbers and addresses are never sent anywhere.

It does not cancel anything by itself

Flagged orders are marked for you to look at. They are not held, cancelled or refunded. You decide.

There is one optional exception, off by default: you can make customers whose delivery you personally marked as refused pay in advance. They can still buy — cash on delivery simply is not offered to them. That uses only refusals you recorded yourself, never a guess.

If cash on delivery is the only payment method your shop offers, this does nothing at all. Taking away the only way to pay would lose you the sale rather than secure it.