01 · The problem
Why shipping unconfirmed orders quietly bankrupts sellers
Somebody watches a fifteen second video, taps a form, types a name and a phone number, and moves on with their day. That is a lead. Some of those people genuinely want the product. Some tapped by accident. Some typed a wrong digit. Some meant it at the time and have already forgotten.
If you ship all of them, you pay to pack and send every one, and a large share come straight back. You paid for the outbound leg, you pay for the return leg, you collected nothing, and the stock spent a week travelling instead of selling.
The asymmetry is brutal. A confirmation call costs a fixed, small amount on every lead. A refused parcel costs several times that, plus the stock being out of circulation.
The buyer who says the price back to you out loud is the buyer who has the cash ready when the courier knocks.
What the call is actually doing
It is not a sales call and it is not a formality. It does four specific jobs:
- Confirms the address exists and is where the buyer will be. Mistyped addresses are a surprisingly large slice of failed deliveries.
- Says the price out loud. If the buyer is surprised by the number on the phone, they would have been surprised at the door, and that surprise is a refusal.
- Checks they actually want it. The accidental taps filter themselves out here, at €1.20 instead of the full cost of a round trip.
- Sets expectations. The buyer knows a parcel is coming, roughly when, and that they need cash for it.
02 · The process
How it works
The lead lands in the dashboard
The moment your form is submitted. No batching, no waiting for an export.
An agent calls, in the buyer's language
Romanian for Romanian buyers, Bulgarian for Bulgarian, Greek for Greek. Not English with an accent, and not a recorded message. This is the part that does the work.
Up to seven attempts across the day and following days
People are at work, driving, or ignoring unknown numbers. One attempt confirms a fraction of what seven does, and you are not charged more for the extra tries.
Confirmed orders go to packing, everything else stops
Only a confirmed order reaches the warehouse floor. Unreachable and declined leads never become a parcel, so they never become a return.
You see every outcome
Confirmed, declined, unreachable, wrong number. That breakdown is how you tell a traffic problem from a product problem, which is not something you can see in an ad dashboard.
03 · The arithmetic
What confirmation is actually worth
Here are the two approaches on identical traffic. On the left, ship every lead and hope. On the right, pay €1.20 a lead, ship only the confirmed ones, and accept that some leads never become orders.
Set the rates to whatever you believe. The defaults are deliberately conservative, and they are assumptions rather than a promise: your real numbers depend on your product, your ad and your market.
Ship everything vs confirm first
Same leads, same product, same route. The only difference is whether anybody picks up the phone.
The thing worth noticing: confirming reduces the number of parcels you send, sometimes by a lot. Sellers see that and worry they are losing sales. You are not. Those parcels were going to come back. You are choosing not to pay for the round trip.
Note also that the fee is charged on every lead including the ones that never answer. That is the honest cost of filtering, and it is still the cheapest filter available.
04 · The alternatives
Calls versus OTP codes and WhatsApp bots
There is a whole category of Shopify and WooCommerce apps that confirm COD orders automatically, through an SMS one-time code, an automated call, or a WhatsApp message. They are cheap, they install in minutes, and they are a genuine improvement on shipping blind. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, so here is the real comparison.
Where automated confirmation wins
Cost per order is far lower, it works instantly at any hour, and it scales without limit. If you are running thousands of low-ticket orders a day and margin per order is thin, automation is the sensible answer.
Where it also wins
An OTP proves the phone number is real and belongs to somebody paying attention. That alone kills a meaningful share of junk leads, and it does it for pennies.
What it cannot do
A code confirms a number. It does not confirm that the address is right, that the buyer understood the price, or that they will have cash at the door. Those are the three things that actually drive refusals, and none of them survive contact with an automated message.
The silent failure
Automated messages get ignored far more than a human voice does. A buyer who does not respond to a bot is not the same as a buyer who does not want the product, but your system treats them identically and you never find out which.
Our honest position: if your product is cheap and your volume is enormous, use the apps. If your average order is €25 or more, where a single wasted round trip costs several times what the confirmation call does, a person on the phone pays for itself and then some. Plenty of sellers do both, with an automated filter first and a human call on what survives.
05 · The price
What it costs
€1.20 per lead. Not per call, not per attempt, not per minute. One fee covering up to seven attempts in the buyer's own language, whatever the outcome.
Charging per lead rather than per attempt is deliberate. If we charged per attempt we would be paid more for calling more, which is exactly the wrong incentive. This way, the only thing we gain from is a lead that turns into a delivered order, which is what you want too.
The fee sits alongside the rest of the rate card: free fulfillment out of Romania, shipping from €3.31, 4% COD collection on delivered orders under $45, free warehousing and storage. Everything is published on the fees page, including a calculator that runs the whole model.
One thing to be clear about
We do not promise a confirmation rate or a delivery rate, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. Those numbers depend on your product, your ad, your price and your market far more than on the call. What we control is that every lead gets called properly, in the right language, enough times, before anything ships.
06 · FAQ
Questions people ask
Per lead. €1.20 covers up to seven attempts, whatever the outcome. A lead that never answers costs the same as one that confirms on the first ring.
The buyer's own. Romanian into Romania, Bulgarian into Bulgaria, Greek into Greece, and so on across the markets we serve. This matters more than anything else about the call: an unfamiliar language on an unknown number gets hung up on.
After seven attempts they are marked unreachable and never become a parcel. You are charged the €1.20 lead fee but nothing else, and no stock leaves the shelf. Those are the orders that would otherwise have shipped and come straight back.
On our network every order is called before it ships. That is not an upsell, it is how we keep delivery rates where they need to be for the model to work at all. If you want to compare the two approaches on your own numbers, the calculator on this page does exactly that.
Usually not, if every order is already being called. Some sellers keep an automated filter in front as a first pass on very high volume, which is a reasonable belt-and-braces setup. For most sellers it is duplicated cost.
We deliberately do not quote one, because it is driven by your product, price, ad and market rather than by us. What we can tell you is what to watch: if your confirmation rate falls when you scale ad spend, the traffic got worse, not the calling. That distinction is the most useful thing the call outcomes give you.