Checkout & Payment
COD not shown on the product page
Cash on delivery may be available, but the buyer cannot see it until checkout, so they assume it is prepaid-only and leave.
What this leak is doing on your store
Cash on delivery is still the default trust mechanism for a huge share of Indian online buyers, especially first-time customers of a brand they have never heard of. If your product page does not say COD is available, a cautious buyer assumes it is not, and a stranger asking them to pay upfront for an unknown brand is a hard sell. The cost is not just the lost prepaid-averse buyer; it is the buyer who would have happily paid online later but needed COD as a safety net to place that very first order. Hiding the COD badge until the final step means the reassurance arrives after the buyer has already decided to leave, which is the worst possible time to reveal your best argument.
A Bengaluru supplements brand offered COD but only revealed it as a payment radio button on the final checkout screen. Their product pages spoke only of secure online payment, so cautious buyers who would have ordered COD never got that far and the brand assumed its audience simply preferred prepaid.
How an Indian buyer reads this
A first-time Indian buyer scans the product page for the letters COD almost reflexively, the same way they look for a price. When it is not there, the internal script is simple: this brand wants my money before I have seen the product, and I do not know them well enough for that. They either abandon outright or go hunting for the brand on Instagram to gauge whether real people have received real parcels, and most do not come back from that detour.
Severity and where we usually see it
- Typical severity: 5 to 9 out of 10 — critical when present.
- Where we see it: Shopify, WooCommerce.
- India-specific: Yes — this leak hits Indian D2C stores harder than Western tools assume.
How MakeMeConvert detects it
We scan the product and homepage text for COD or cash-on-delivery mentions and watch the has_cod_signal flag, which fires when a COD badge or copy is present in the buy area. We also factor detected_checkout_app, since apps like GoKwik surface COD inside their own flow. If COD is genuinely offered but never advertised above checkout, the leak fires as a trust and visibility gap.
What fixing it looks like
The direction is to make COD availability a visible reassurance on the product page itself, framed as a reason to trust the first order, not a payment afterthought. How you present it without inviting RTO abuse, and how it interacts with prepaid incentives, is the work we scope in the paid audit.
Want to put a number on it? RTO Profitability Calculator shows you the real cost on your own unit economics. Or just score your store free to see if this leak is open.