Cash on delivery is often treated as a legacy habit the GCC will eventually grow out of. It has not, and there are good reasons why — trust in card data online is still catching up in parts of the region, and COD remains the path of least resistance for a first-time buyer on an unfamiliar store. The mistake is not offering COD. The mistake is not knowing what it actually costs you to keep offering it unchecked.
The real cost of COD is not the cash handling
Counting notes at the end of a shift is the visible cost, but it is the smallest one. The bigger costs are the return-to-origin rate on refused COD parcels, the driver time spent carrying and reconciling cash, and the working-capital gap between shipping an order and actually seeing the money — which for a fast-moving grocery or quick-commerce operation compounds daily. Cash reconciliation against a delivery collection log closes most of the handling risk, but it does not touch the working-capital drag, which is the part that shows up on a cash-flow statement, not an ops dashboard.
Prepaid is not one thing — it is a stack of options
The GCC has genuine card-payment infrastructure now, and it is not limited to international processors. Telr, N-Genius, PayFort, Tap and MyFatoorah all carry meaningful transaction volume in the region and each has slightly different strengths — local acquiring relationships, settlement speed, dispute handling. Layer BNPL — Tabby and Tamara are the two names that matter here — on top, and a shopper who was never going to pay by card up front gets a prepaid option that still feels like COD in spirit: no money moves until the goods are confirmed as wanted, just split differently.
Shift the mix at the point of decision, not after
Trying to remove COD outright usually just moves the sale to a competitor who still offers it. What actually shifts the mix is making the prepaid path genuinely easier at the exact moment a shopper is choosing — a saved card from a previous order, a one-tap wallet payment, a BNPL instalment preview that makes a bigger basket feel smaller. None of this requires banning COD. It requires prepaid to stop asking the customer to do more work than cash does.
What the shift actually buys you
A ten-point shift from COD to prepaid across a delivery fleet of any real size is not a rounding error — it is fewer cash reconciliation cycles, faster settlement into working capital, and a lower return-to-origin rate because a paid order is a confirmed order in a way a COD order sometimes is not. None of that means COD disappears from a GCC storefront any time soon, and it should not — it is still how a meaningful share of the region buys for the first time. The goal is not zero COD. It is COD that is a choice rather than a default.
Track the mix, not just the total
The single most useful number most shops never look at is COD share by customer cohort rather than COD share overall — first-time buyers, repeat buyers, and buyers referred by a specific channel typically show very different payment behaviour. A storefront that reports this split makes the prepaid push measurable rather than a hunch: if repeat customers are already 70% prepaid but first-time buyers are 90% COD, the fix is trust-building at the first order, not a blanket checkout redesign.
Settlement timing is the variable most shops underweight
Two gateways quoting near-identical transaction fees can still have very different cash-flow impact depending on how fast they settle — same-day versus a T+2 or T+3 cycle is the difference between paying a supplier out of this week’s revenue or last week’s. For a fast-moving grocery or quick-commerce operation buying stock constantly, that gap compounds in a way a flat percentage fee on the pricing page never shows. Ask any prepaid gateway for its real settlement schedule, not the one in the marketing deck, before weighting it against COD’s same-day cash in hand.