01 · The setup
Why half of Europe still pays the courier in cash
In most of Western Europe, an online order is paid before it moves. Card, PayPal, done. In Romania, Bulgaria and Greece that is still the minority behaviour. The buyer sees the ad, orders in a few taps, and hands notes to the courier at the door. No card entered, no account created, no trust required up front.
It is not a technology gap. It is a trust habit that never got broken, and it holds strongest exactly where ecommerce is growing fastest. For a seller, that changes everything about how you start:
- You do not need a payment processor, so you do not need a registered company, a business bank account, or an approved merchant profile before your first sale.
- Buyers convert on a phone number, not on a card. A simple form beats a full checkout, and cart abandonment stops being your main leak.
- Your risk moves from chargebacks to refusals. Nobody disputes a payment they never made. Instead, some parcels come back unopened. That is a different problem with different fixes.
How much of ecommerce runs on cash
Share of online orders paid on delivery. Ranges, not point estimates, because the number swings hard by category.
Ranges reflect published industry estimates for 2025 and 2026 and vary by vertical. Supplements, cosmetics and consumer goods sit at the top of each range. Electronics and higher ticket items sit lower.
COD is not a payment method in these markets. It is the default, and prepaid is the exception you have to argue for.
Where COD is strong, where it is fading
Strongest: Romania, Bulgaria, Greece. Cash is the assumed option and buyers hesitate when you remove it.
Still significant: Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland. COD works well, but card and instant bank transfer are growing year over year, especially in the capitals.
Meaningful but secondary: Italy, Spain, Portugal. COD is real, particularly outside the big cities and for older buyers, but you will see a bigger prepaid share and a higher average order value.
02 · The map
Where you can ship, and what each route costs
A COD business lives or dies on two numbers per country: how fast the parcel arrives and what the route costs you. Below is the real network. Pick a destination and you get the cheapest warehouse to ship it from, the courier that carries it, the transit time, and the return cost if the buyer refuses.
One thing shapes the whole table. Fulfillment out of the Romania hub is free, so Romania wins almost every Eastern European route even when a closer warehouse exists. That is why most sellers on the network start there and only add a second hub when volume justifies it.
Route explorer
Live network rates. Shipping plus fulfillment, per parcel, 300 g to 1.2 kg.
Read this before you pick a country
Cheap shipping into a country you cannot advertise profitably is worthless. Check ad costs first, route costs second. Romania and Bulgaria usually give the best combination of low delivery cost and affordable traffic, which is exactly why they are crowded. Greece and Hungary are often quieter for less competition at a slightly higher cost per parcel.
03 · The anatomy
What a single COD order actually costs you
Most people budget for shipping and get surprised by everything else. A COD order touches five separate cost lines, and three of them are charged on orders that never turn into revenue. That asymmetry is the whole game.
Charged on every lead, even the bad ones
Advertising. Your cost per lead is your biggest single number and the one you control least. Plan around it, not for it.
Call centre confirmation. On the EuropShip network this is €1.20 per lead, not per call attempt. Agents call in the buyer's own language, up to seven times, and only confirmed orders move to packing. A lead that never answers still cost you the fee, and still saved you a shipment that would have bounced.
Charged on every confirmed order
Shipping and fulfillment. Pick, pack, label, courier handover, door delivery. From €3.31 on the cheapest routes. Fulfillment is free out of Romania and between €1 and €2.20 out of Bulgaria, Spain and Italy. Warehousing and storage are €0 in every hub, so stock sitting on a shelf costs nothing.
Charged only when it actually delivers
Product cost and the COD collection fee of 4% on delivered orders under $45. This is the good kind of cost. It only appears next to revenue.
Charged when it comes back
Returns. Free on several Romania routes, a flat few euros on others, or the same rate as shipping. This is the line that punishes a bad delivery rate twice: you paid to send it, and you pay to get it back.
Full tables, every country, every warehouse, are on the fees page with a calculator that runs the same arithmetic. To go deeper on the carriers themselves, who covers what and what each charges to bring a refused parcel back, we compared all of them on the COD courier page. The two main hubs have their own pages too: Romania and Bulgaria.
New cost line since July 2026
The EU removed the €150 customs duty exemption from 1 July 2026. A flat €3 duty now applies per item type, with several countries adding a per-parcel handling fee on top, so if you import one parcel at a time from China every order carries it. Holding stock in an EU warehouse means one customs entry per restock rather than one per sale. The de minimis page runs the per-order arithmetic.
04 · The math
What 100 leads actually leaves in your pocket
This is where most guides go vague. Here is the model, running on the real rates above. Move the sliders and watch which input actually decides whether you make money. Spoiler: it is almost never the shipping rate.
Profit on 100 leads
Same model as the calculator on our fees page. Ad spend is yours, everything else is network cost.
Drag the delivery rate from 75% down to 55% and watch the profit collapse while every other number stays identical. That is the entire lesson of COD in one slider. You are not running a shipping business, you are running a delivery rate business.
05 · The playbook
Six steps to your first delivered order
Pick one country, not a region
Romania if you want the biggest COD share and the most proven playbook. Bulgaria or Greece if you want less competition. One country means one language for your page, one call script, one set of ad costs to learn. Sellers who launch three countries at once learn nothing from any of them.
Pick a product that survives a doorstep
Under 1.2 kg so it stays in the cheap shipping band. Visual enough to sell in a 15 second video. Priced so that a 3x to 4x markup still feels fair at the door. Avoid anything fragile, anything with sizing, and anything the buyer needs to research before they believe it works.
Get stock into a warehouse in the region
This is the step that separates COD from classic dropshipping. Ship from China once, in bulk, into the hub. Two to four week supplier lead times become 24 to 48 hour buyer delivery. If you do not have a supplier yet, send us a sourcing request and we quote the factory price, the shipping and the duties as one number.
Build a landing page, not a store
One product, one promise, one form. Name, phone, city. That is it. Every extra field costs you leads, and the call centre confirms the rest anyway. Load it fast, write it in the local language, and put the price on the page.
Run traffic and read the right number
Facebook and TikTok both work. Your metric is not cost per lead, it is cost per delivered order. A €2 lead that confirms at 40% is worse than a €4 lead that confirms at 75%, and you cannot see that in the ad dashboard.
Only scale a stable number
Wait until you have around 100 delivered orders on one product in one country. If the delivery rate holds when you double the budget, double again. If it drops, you found your ceiling. Scaling a shaky delivery rate is how COD sellers turn a working product into a warehouse full of returns.
06 · The number
RTO is the number that decides everything
RTO means return to origin: the parcel went out, the buyer refused it or was never home, and it came back. In prepaid ecommerce a refused parcel is annoying. In COD it is the single largest destroyer of margin, because you paid for the lead, the call, the packing, the outbound leg and the return leg, and collected nothing.
Every point of delivery rate is worth more to you than any discount you will ever negotiate on shipping.
What actually moves it
Confirmation calls, done properly. A real conversation in the buyer's language, confirming the address and the price out loud, is the biggest single lever. The buyer who says the price back to you is the buyer who has the cash ready. This is why every order on our network gets called before it ships, and the call centre page has a calculator comparing what happens when you skip it.
Honest ads. If the ad implies a discount that the page does not honour, the buyer finds out at the door and refuses. Overpromising converts better and delivers worse, and delivery is what pays you.
Speed. Impulse buys cool off. A parcel arriving in 24 hours is accepted at a much higher rate than the same parcel arriving on day six. This is the entire argument for holding stock in the region instead of shipping from China per order.
An SMS before the courier arrives. Cheap, and it cuts the "nobody home" category noticeably.
Price discipline. Higher ticket means more doorstep hesitation. If your RTO climbs as you raise price, you found the ceiling for that product in that market.
A rough benchmark
On a confirmed order, a healthy delivery rate in the strong COD markets sits around 70% to 85%. Below 65% something upstream is broken, usually the ad or the call script rather than the courier. Do not fix the courier first. Fix the promise first.
07 · The traps
Five ways sellers lose money on COD
Optimising ads for cheap leads
Broad, cheap traffic produces people who tap by accident and refuse at the door. Judge every campaign on cost per delivered order or you will scale the wrong one.
Scaling before the delivery rate is stable
Doubling budget on a product with 40 delivered orders is a coin flip. The RTO rate almost always moves when the audience widens, and it rarely moves in your favour.
Forgetting that cash arrives late
You pay for ads today and collect COD after delivery, then after payout. That gap is real working capital. Sellers with a working product still run out of money here.
Launching four countries at once
Four ad accounts, four languages, four sets of noise, and not enough data in any of them to make a decision. Win one, then copy it.
Treating returns as someone else's problem
Returned stock is your stock. It needs to be checked, restocked and resold. Sellers who ignore the return shelf discover a third of their inventory sitting there three months later.
08 · FAQ
Questions people actually ask
Not to start testing. Because there is no card processor in the flow, there is no merchant account to approve. You do need a legal entity once you are operating at real volume, for invoicing, VAT and payouts, and you should talk to an accountant in your own country about when that line is. Many sellers run their first months as an individual and register once a product proves itself.
The honest floor is enough to buy a first stock batch and fund roughly two weeks of ad spend before any COD cash reaches you. On a €9 product with a €4 cost per lead, that is realistically €1,500 to €3,000. Anyone quoting €200 is describing classic dropshipping, which is a different and much slower model.
Out of the Romania hub it is 24 hours to Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, and 48 hours to Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia. Out of Spain it is 24 hours to Spain and Portugal. Those are courier transit times from handover, so add the confirmation call, usually the same day.
On our network, COD collected is paid out weekly to your own bank account, every Friday. The important thing to plan for is the gap between spending on ads and receiving that cash, not the payout day itself.
Light, visual, demonstrable, and priced where a 3x to 4x markup still feels reasonable at the door. Home and cleaning gadgets, beauty devices, kitchen tools and simple accessories dominate for a reason. Anything requiring sizing, anything fragile, and anything the buyer wants to research first will hurt your delivery rate.
On confirmed orders in the strong COD markets, expect 15% to 30% of parcels to come back. Under 20% is good. Above 35% means something is wrong upstream, almost always the ad promise or the confirmation call rather than the courier.
Yes, but not as the zero cost model people describe. The version that works now holds stock in a European warehouse, confirms every order by phone, and delivers in 24 to 48 hours. The version that ships from China per order and takes three weeks is dead, killed by the sellers who deliver in a day.
Shipping from €3.31, fulfillment free out of Romania and €1 to €2.20 elsewhere, call centre €1.20 per lead, 4% COD collection on delivered orders under $45, and returns from free to €5 depending on the route. Warehousing and storage are free. Every number is published on the fees page, including a calculator.