How to Stop Losing Money on Cash-on-Delivery Returns in CEE

If you sell online in Central and Eastern Europe, you know how bad it feels when cash-on-delivery packages come right back to your warehouse. What surprises many store owners, especially when selling in Romania or Bulgaria, is what can happen at the front door. Over 80% of online shops in Bulgaria offer cash on delivery, and in some markets and with certain courier services, customers can also inspect or open a parcel before accepting it. This adds another layer of uncertainty for merchants shipping COD orders.

It may seem unusual to people from other countries, but paying cash at the door is normal in many parts of CEE. As Marcin Pondo recently discussed on our Cross Border Commerce Association’s podcast with Darko Dujič, who knows a lot about selling in this region, cash on delivery makes up 70% to 80% of all sales in countries like Serbia. Cash on delivery is also common in Bulgaria and Romania. This is not simply a question of technology. In many CEE markets, COD remains deeply rooted in customer habits and trust: buyers may feel more comfortable paying only when the parcel actually arrives.

For merchants, however, this means shipping the order before receiving any money from the customer. And that is where the financial risk begins.

This causes a huge shipping and returns nightmare for online shops.

Whether a customer changes their mind, forgets about the order, cannot be reached, or deliberately orders the same product from several shops, the financial consequence for the merchant is often the same.

Meanwhile, your item sits in a delivery van for two weeks while the buyer ignores the driver’s phone calls. These unpaid packages ruin your profit much faster than bad ads ever will.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply reducing COD orders. It is identifying which orders deserve additional verification before you spend money shipping them.

The answer is not to stop offering cash payments. If you force card payments on people who do not want them, they will just leave your website without buying.

You need a simple plan that protects your money without losing real buyers.

A practical approach works in layers: first confirm questionable orders, then learn from your own customer history, and finally use additional information when your own database does not have an answer.

Before changing your COD process, measure the problem. Track how many COD parcels are successfully delivered, refused or left uncollected, and calculate the average outbound and return shipping cost. Looking at these numbers by country and courier can show where additional verification will have the biggest financial impact.

Call and Confirm Before Shipping

Before buying expensive tools, simple habits can save you a lot of cash. On the podcast, Darko shared an interesting fact about buyers in Serbia: they love calling stores. They often call to ask about a product or even try to get a small discount over the phone. If you do not have a clear local phone number or someone to answer calls, you are losing a lot of sales.

But you do not necessarily need to treat every order the same way. Once customers have ordered from you before, their own delivery history can tell you where additional checks are actually needed.

Build Your Own Database of Trusted COD Customers

Your past orders are a useful starting point. Build an internal record of which customers have accepted and paid for their cash-on-delivery orders, using the order and delivery data already available in your shop.

Keep track of successful deliveries, refused or uncollected parcels, and the reasons behind failed attempts. A wrong address or a courier problem is different from a customer repeatedly refusing an order. Update the record as deliveries are completed or issues are resolved.

There is one important limit: your database only knows what has happened in your own shop. A new customer may therefore look completely unknown to you, even if they already have a COD delivery history with other online shops. This is the gap that a service such as ProteCOD is designed to address.

ProteCOD: Looking Beyond Your Own Customer History

ProteCOD is designed to help with the blind spot described above. When someone places their first order with your shop, ProteCOD can provide an additional signal based on COD delivery history associated with that customer across participating e-shops. It does not give you access to other merchants’ customer lists or individual order records.

In simple terms, your own database tells you how a customer behaved with you; ProteCOD can add information based on relevant history beyond your own shop.

For example, imagine a customer placing their first order with your webshop. Your own database has no information about them. If ProteCOD has relevant history associated with that customer, its signal can give you another piece of information before you decide whether to offer COD normally, confirm the order first, or request prepayment.

The technical process happens in the background. According to ProteCOD’s documentation, the customer’s email address is converted into a hashed identifier before the system is queried. ProteCOD uses that identifier to match relevant delivery history and return a reputation signal. Participating merchants do not receive the underlying email addresses or individual customer records from other shops.

In other words, the signal gives the shop an indication of whether the available history suggests normal or potentially problematic COD behaviour.

This can help assess someone who is new to your store but has a delivery history elsewhere in the network. Depending on your integration and settings, the signal can inform whether COD is offered, whether the order receives an additional confirmation step, or whether prepayment is requested. It cannot guarantee that a new order will be accepted, particularly when no relevant history is available.

Keep COD. Reduce the Avoidable Losses.

The strongest approach combines the three steps: confirm orders before dispatch, learn from your own delivery history, and use a signal such as ProteCOD when your internal records are not enough. Together, these checks can help you protect your margins while keeping cash on delivery available to reliable buyers.

Each layer solves a different problem: confirmation helps validate the current order, your own database helps with returning customers, and ProteCOD can provide additional context when the customer is new to you.

You do not need to ban cash on delivery to protect your margins. You need a better way to identify which COD orders require additional checks before you ship them.