subject: What Is Going To Happen If My Courier Shipment Is Refused? [print this page] Most of the time when you ship something to a customer, they have already paid for it. They will simply sign for the package, and hopefully order from you again in the future. There can be situations where this is not the case though. Most notably, this can happen when you use your Santa Clarita delivery company to ship something COD to a customer instead. When you're shipping COD, a whole new set of rules apply, and it's important to be prepared for what you might run into.
When something is sent to a customer COD, it means that the customer has not paid for that order yet. However, they are not necessarily obliged to either. When you ship something to a customer COD, they are not obliged to take delivery of that package to pay for it. Instead, if they so choose, they do have the option to refuse the package and have it returned to you instead.
Usually, a customer is not going to refuse a COD shipment. The majority of these types of shipments which are sent out are accepted and paid for in due course, as you would expect. When the exceptions to this occur, it is usually a result of a problem with the product. The most common reasons for COD shipments to be refused are because they were damaged, or because the wrong product arrived, or because the product was not as originally promised.
If your shipment is refused, the courier who tried to deliver it is going to instead have to return it to you. This means a couple of things. Mostly, it means that you're going to have a loss on the shipment due to additional shipping costs.
You are going to have to pay for the shipping to the customer and for the return shipping to yourself. Normally, the amount that a customer would pay for the shipped item would include a shipping fee, covering that cost, so essentially you're ending up having to pay double shipping as a penalty for the shipment being refused.
The upside is that this only happens rarely. Most people are not frivolous about what they order, and just because they can refuse a COD shipment doesn't' suddenly mean that they will. Most people are only going to order something that they want, which means if the right item arrives in good shape, almost all of your orders should be happily accepted by your customers.
