Cash-on-delivery (COD) is still how most Pakistani e-commerce customers prefer to pay — and it's also the single biggest source of wasted courier trips, return shipping costs, and cash flow headaches for store owners. A fake or unconfirmed order doesn't just cost you the sale; it costs you the courier fee both ways.
Most "fake" COD orders aren't malicious. They're impulse checkouts, wrong phone numbers, kids placing orders on a parent's phone, or customers who simply changed their mind five minutes later and never came back to cancel. A small number are genuinely fraudulent — competitors or bored users placing orders they never intend to accept.
Doing this manually — calling every COD order yourself — doesn't scale past a handful of orders a day. Tools like automated robo-calling and WhatsApp order-confirmation flows do this at whatever volume your store runs at, and only escalate to a human for orders that need a real conversation.
The goal isn't to make checkout harder. It's to catch the 10–20% of orders that were never going to be delivered anyway, before a courier gets booked for them.
If you're running a Shopify or WooCommerce store in Pakistan and losing money to return shipping, this is usually the single highest-ROI thing you can add to your checkout flow.