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Risk scoring gets the attention, but during a sale the settings that quietly save the most money are caps and gates: hard limits on how much cash-on-delivery exposure you take on, and where. They need no model and no tuning — just numbers you commit to before the traffic arrives.
Order-value cap
Pick the basket value above which a cash order is a coin flip for you. Above it, require a partial advance; well above it, prepaid only. The right number is your average order value times roughly one and a half — high enough that most ordinary orders never see the rule, low enough that the big sale baskets, which return most often, do. Show the reason at checkout: shoppers accept 'orders over ₹2,000 need a ₹200 advance' far better than a silent block.
Item-count cap
Five of the same t-shirt in five sizes on COD is a try-on order, not a purchase. Cap the item count per COD order at whatever your genuine bulk buyers need, and route anything above it to prepaid. Fashion stores feel this rule most; it barely fires elsewhere.
Per-phone, per-day cap
One verified phone number, one cash order per day. The second attempt from the same number is almost always a duplicate placed after a delivery-date worry, or a prank. Because checkout verifies the phone by OTP, the cap actually holds — it cannot be dodged with a second email address.
Pincode gating: prefix, not list
- Start from your own courier data: pincodes where more than a third of last season's COD parcels came back.
- Gate by prefix where the pattern is regional — the first three digits cover a district, and the RTO behaviour usually does too.
- Prefer partial-COD to a hard block for the borderline areas; a full block loses the honest buyers along with the risky ones.
- Keep serviceability separate from risk: a pincode your courier cannot reach should not be offered COD or prepaid — it should be told so at address entry.
State-level rules
A few states carry consistently worse cash-order economics because of courier reach and remoteness. A state-level partial-COD rule is a blunt instrument, but during a sale a blunt instrument that runs automatically beats a precise one nobody has time to operate. Set it, and refine to pincode level after the season using what the data shows.
Putting it together
Caps and gates sit underneath the risk engine: the score handles the judgement calls, the caps handle the obvious. Together with a WhatsApp confirmation before dispatch, most stores find the settings above cover the bulk of sale-season RTO with no daily babysitting — which, in October, is the whole point.
See it live on a private preview of your checkout.