Cash on Delivery (COD) Reconciliation for Indian Sellers

COD still accounts for a meaningful share of orders on Indian marketplaces, and it introduces a reconciliation step that prepaid orders skip entirely: the gap between when the customer pays cash and when that cash actually reaches your bank as a settlement.

A prepaid order settles against a payment the marketplace already collected digitally at checkout. A COD order settles against cash the delivery partner collected in person — which means there’s an extra handoff (courier to marketplace) where money can go missing, get remitted late, or get remitted short.

The practical tracking sequence for a COD order runs: dispatch, then delivery confirmation, then a remittance-expectation window (typically 5–7 days after delivery, though this varies by marketplace and seller tier), then the actual bank credit. An order that’s delivered but hasn’t settled within that window isn’t necessarily wrong — but it needs to move from "normal" to "flagged for follow-up" once it’s meaningfully overdue.

COD collection charges are also worth checking separately from standard shipping fees — some marketplaces apply an additional COD handling fee on top of logistics costs, which is legitimate, but easy to mistake for a duplicate shipping charge if you’re not looking at the fee-type breakdown.

Because COD orders carry this extra timing dimension, reconciling them against a simple "delivered = paid" assumption produces false positives constantly. Tracking each COD order through its full cycle — not just comparing a snapshot total — is the only way to tell a genuinely missing remittance from one that’s simply still in transit.