subject: What Happens If My Shipment Is Refused? [print this page] You can do everything rightYou can do everything right. You can make sure you describe the item in perfect detail, you can ship it with reliable delivery services, and you can make sure that it gets to your customer in a reasonable shipping time. However, despite all these best efforts, the customer may still refuse your package if it is sent to them COD.
COD means collect on delivery. If you're shipping to a customer on a COD basis it means that they haven't actually paid for their product yet, and they are expected to pay your courier when they make the delivery. However, there are laws in place which are designed to help make sure that customers aren't taken advantage of by companies that are shipping on a COD basis. As such, every customer has the right to refuse anything that is shipped to them COD.
Unfortunately, this is going to cost you money. When a customer refuses to pay for the order, the courier is obviously not going to leave the package with them. This means that they are going to need to complete the delivery back to you so that you can try to resell the item. Couriers don't deliver anything for free though, which means that you're going to have to pay for the cost of shipping the item back to yourself.
There really isn't anything that you can do about having to pay the courier if your COD shipment is refused. Instead, you should concentrate on making sure that your products are not refused. The two main ways to do this are being sure that you describe the product accurately, and by making sure that the product is shipped quickly. That way, customers don't feel like they have been lied to in any way, and also don't have time to just change their mind on a whim. You can also reduce refusals using things like photo inventory, so customers can view their actual product before ordering.
The good news is that COD shipments aren't actually refused as often as come companies think they are. Many people convince themselves that every COD order that they send out is going to be refused, and so they decide that this isn't a shipping option that they even want to offer. On the contrary, this can be a very profitable and useful shipping method, and not one that you should dismiss just because a few orders may end up being returned to you.
