COD order review is the process of checking a cash-on-delivery order’s risk information and deciding whether to approve it, hold it for clarification or cancel it. Razorpay Magic Checkout lets merchants review Risk Reasons, recommendations and customer details before choosing the action that fits the order. Return to origin (RTO) occurs when an undelivered shipment returns to the sender.
A cash-on-delivery order lands in your fulfilment queue with a risk flag against it. Cancel it on sight and you may have thrown away a genuine sale. Ship it without checking and you may send an unresolved problem into your warehouse, your courier network and your returns ledger.
Without an agreed review process, a risk flag leaves the team unsure what to check or what each action changes. The trigger is usually practical: returned COD shipments are climbing, an address looks wrong, or the review queue is growing faster than anyone can clear it. The question is always the same. Should we approve, hold or cancel this COD order before dispatch?
Key Takeaways
- Razorpay Magic Checkout gives COD review teams an RTO risk level, Risk Reasons, recommendations and customer details to inform their decision.
- Approve records review without changing the order; hold keeps a decision open while you clarify details; cancel applies the documented cancellation action.
- An incorrect address can justify a customer clarification step. Address autofill and a risk signal do not prove that an address is deliverable.
- The COD Orders Review Workflow can automate an action for each RTO risk type after manual review is enabled.
- Check the result on your connected ecommerce platform and in fulfilment operations. A status or tag alone is not proof that shipping has stopped.
- Assess delivered orders, RTOs, cancellations, review delays and lost genuine sales together. Approval is a review decision, not a delivery or reimbursement guarantee.
How Does Razorpay Magic Checkout Turn COD Risk Into a Review Decision?
Razorpay Magic Checkout helps ecommerce teams act on COD order risk by showing the order’s RTO risk level, Risk Reasons, recommendations and customer details. Reviewers can approve, hold or cancel an order. The practical value is a defined decision before fulfilment, with a documented path for orders that need clarification.
Start With the Risk Reason, Then Choose the Action
The manual COD order review guide documents a review list containing the Razorpay Order ID, the receipt, the date the order was placed, and the RTO risk level. Opening a specific Order ID reveals the Risk Reasons, the recommendation and the customer details attached to that order.
That gives a reviewer four useful things:
- A risk level helps prioritise the queue.
- A reason helps the reviewer identify what needs checking.
- The order decision reflects the information available and the merchant’s policy.
- A high-risk order may still belong to a genuine buyer, and a low-risk label does not establish delivery certainty.
Keep COD Delivery Risk Separate From Payment Fraud
COD review answers a fulfilment question: should this order proceed, and in what state? It is not the same work as screening a card or UPI transaction. Exporter risk analytics, Razorpay’s card-risk products and card Address Verification System checks have different scopes and different eligibility. For the wider rule-engine and risk-scoring picture, read the built-in fraud detection guide.
DID YOU KNOW: The manual-review documentation shows the reason and recommendation alongside customer details, so the reviewer can examine more than the risk label alone.
When Should You Approve, Hold or Cancel a COD Order?
Approve a COD order after reviewing it and resolving material concerns. Hold it while you clarify an address or other order detail. Cancel it when the available evidence and your order policy justify cancellation. Razorpay Magic Checkout supports all three actions; your team must decide which action is appropriate for the individual order.
| Action | When the merchant might choose it | What the documentation says | Required follow-up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Approve | The reviewer is satisfied after checking the order | Records that the order was reviewed; there is no change to the order itself | Check the platform and normal fulfilment readiness |
| Hold | A decision needs customer clarification, such as an incorrect address | Marks the order on hold while the reviewer decides whether to approve or cancel | Assign an owner, contact the customer and revisit the order |
| Cancel | Risk reasons and the merchant’s policy justify stopping the order | Cancels the order in the COD orders view and on the connected ecommerce platform | Verify the platform result and stop shipment processing through your operational controls |
Choose the action based on the unresolved concern and your order policy. After cancellation, verify the connected store and dispatch process before taking further action; do not assume the review interface provides an undo option.
Use Hold for a Question You Can Resolve
A buyer enters a recognisable street name, but the building detail reads like a fragment and the reviewer cannot tell which premises the courier should attempt. The reviewer places the order on hold, contacts the buyer through the store’s approved channel, and records the clarification in the merchant’s own operational system. Once the detail is confirmed, the reviewer returns to the order and chooses approve or cancel. Confirm how your store handles address corrections, customer messages and notes; the documented review action alone does not establish those steps.
Do Not Treat High Risk as Automatic Proof
“High risk means cancel” is one possible merchant-chosen rule. It is not a mandatory Razorpay default, and a risk tier is not evidence of fraud. The product estimates delivery risk and explains why. Your policy decides what that estimate is worth.
PRO-TIP: Give every held order an owner and a review deadline in your team’s operating process. A hold with no follow-up creates a backlog rather than a resolved decision.
What Should You Do When a COD Address Looks Incorrect?
If an address-related risk needs clarification, use Razorpay Magic Checkout’s hold action while your team checks the details with the customer. Review the Risk Reasons, confirm the corrected delivery information through your store’s approved process, then approve or cancel the order. This supports an informed COD decision without treating address autofill as proof of deliverability.
Separate Autofill, Risk Signals and Delivery Confirmation
Separate these four checks when reviewing a COD order.
- Autofill: Reuses available address information so the shopper types less. Check any flagged detail before relying on a prefilled address.
- Address-related risk information: Flags something worth checking. The separate RTO Intelligence API guide includes the example reason “Incorrect pincode state entered”. The API is an on-demand offering. Do not assume every manual-review dashboard exposes the same reason strings or API payload.
- Merchant clarification: Your team confirms the delivery details with the customer and records the outcome.
- Courier serviceability: Check your logistics provider’s coverage through your own process. A serviceable PIN code says nothing about whether a particular house number exists.
Address-bucket reasons are exactly the ones a short customer conversation can plausibly resolve. That is why hold exists as a separate action from cancel.
Where Card AVS Fits
For Indian COD orders, use the documented Magic Checkout order-risk and review workflow to decide what needs clarification before dispatch. Razorpay’s separate card Address Verification System checks a billing address against card-issuer records and is available for US, UK and Canada cards as an on-demand feature for international payments. It serves a different payment-verification purpose and should not be used as evidence that an Indian delivery address has been verified.
DID YOU KNOW: The manual-review documentation explicitly uses an incorrect address as its example of when to hold an order, seek clarification, and only then decide whether to approve or cancel.
Can You Automate Approve, Hold and Cancel Decisions by RTO Risk?
Razorpay’s COD Orders Review Workflow lets merchants map an RTO risk type to approve, hold or cancel after opting into manual review of COD orders. Each risk type can have one action, while the same action can be assigned to several risk types. Choose rules that fit your policy and review capacity.
Manual Review, COD Intelligence and Review-Workflow Automation
The naming matters. The documentation presents COD Intelligence and manual review as alternative operating choices: you either let the automated option act, or you review COD orders yourself. The COD Orders Review Workflow adds automation within manual review. It is accessible only if you have opted for manual review. Automation does not remove that prerequisite.
Configure a Documented Workflow
- Open the Razorpay Dashboard.
- Navigate to Magic Checkout, then Orders.
- In the Manual Review of COD Orders tab, select Automate now.
- Choose a Type of RTO risk and its corresponding action.
- Add more risk types and actions if needed, observing the one-action-per-risk-type restriction.
- Save settings and verify the configuration against your intended policy.
To edit conditions, open Magic Checkout, select your ecommerce platform and click Next, then open COD Review Workflow and select Edit. Save the changed settings. To remove all workflow conditions, use the workflow cancel icon and confirm Yes, Remove. Removing conditions is separate from cancelling an individual COD order.
Illustrative policy: low risk approve, medium risk hold, high risk cancel. That is a merchant policy example, not a Razorpay default. A team with a different customer mix may map it differently.
PRO-TIP: Check review capacity before routing an entire risk tier to hold. Monitor whether the queue produces decisions before the dispatch deadline.
How Do You Enable Manual COD Order Review?
Manual review is enabled from the Razorpay Dashboard through the RTO Reduction setup for your connected store. Confirm the platform prerequisites first, because the connection requirements differ by platform.
- Confirm the store’s Magic Checkout integration and the configuration available to your account.
- Sign in to the Razorpay Dashboard and open Magic Checkout.
- Select the e-commerce platform and enter the relevant store details.
- Open RTO Reduction Setup, then RTO Reduction.
- Turn on Manually review COD orders.
- Complete the platform connection requirements described in the documentation.
- Select Enable manual review and check that COD orders reach the review view.
Check the Platform Connection First
- Shopify: the manual-review guide states that no additional configuration is required at this enablement step. Do not read that as “no setup required for Magic Checkout” overall; see the Shopify configuration documentation.
- WooCommerce: the store’s consumer key and secret are required so review actions can synchronise. Generate them from the WooCommerce configuration steps.
- Custom ecommerce: the guide asks for a review-orders URL and authentication details. Follow the live instructions rather than assuming an endpoint contract.
- Credentials belong in your private configuration. Any screenshot you circulate internally must hide secrets and customer data.
How Do You Review One COD Order in the Dashboard?
The manual-review guide describes reaching the list through Orders, then COD Order Conversion; the automation guide uses Magic Checkout, then Orders. Confirm which navigation your account currently shows.
- Open the documented COD order-review view for the enabled account.
- Identify the order using its Razorpay Order ID, receipt and placement date.
- Read its RTO risk level.
- Open the Order ID to inspect Risk Reasons, recommendations and customer details.
- Decide whether the issue is resolved, needs clarification or justifies cancellation.
- Select approve, on hold, or cancel.
- Check the relevant Approved Orders, Canceled Orders or On Hold Orders tab.
- Verify the result on the connected ecommerce platform and in the fulfilment process.
What to Check Before Dispatch
- Correct order identity confirmed against the receipt and date.
- Action taken and visible in the expected tab.
- Customer clarification completed where the hold required it.
- Platform sync checked in the store admin.
- Shipping policy applied for the chosen action.
- Review owner recorded in your team’s operating system.
Keep a review record in your team’s operating system: order reference, reason checked, decision, reviewer, time and next owner. If you use screenshots to resolve a sync issue, redact customer details and credentials before sharing them through an approved support channel.
What Changes in Shopify or WooCommerce After a Review Action?
A review action is reflected differently depending on the connected platform. The manual-review guide presents this platform mapping, so check how these labels appear in your connected store. A payment-sounding status label is a documentation label, not evidence that COD cash has been collected.
| Razorpay review action | WooCommerce mapping documented in the guide | Shopify mapping documented in the guide |
|---|---|---|
| Approved Orders | Processing | No change; remains Paid, using the guide’s wording |
| Canceled Orders | Failed | Strike-through order, using the manual COD review guide’s wording |
| On Hold Orders | On hold | hold tag in the Tags section |
Verify the Fulfilment Effect Separately
Check the action in your own store and order-management process before dispatch. A Shopify hold tag or a dashboard status does not, by itself, establish that every connected warehouse or shipping app has stopped processing the order.
For WooCommerce COD setup, the troubleshooting guide says to subscribe manually to the payment.pending webhook event. That is an order/payment-event requirement, not evidence that the event synchronises every review action. For a review-state mismatch, check the platform connection and follow the relevant support instructions.
DID YOU KNOW: The documented cancellation mapping in WooCommerce is Failed. Do not promise the same label on every ecommerce platform.
Three COD Review Scenarios for an Operations Team
These three scenarios are illustrative.
A Genuine Buyer With an Address Detail to Clarify
An address-related concern appears on an order from a repeat buyer. The reviewer opens the Order ID, reads the Risk Reasons, and places the order on hold. The support team asks the buyer to confirm the missing detail through the store’s approved channel, then updates the store record. With the concern resolved, the reviewer approves the order and confirms the fulfilment handoff. Verify the corrected store record and resulting review state; a customer conversation alone does not confirm that an address or risk assessment has changed.
A High-Risk Order With an Unresolved Concern
A high-risk order shows reasons the team cannot resolve, and the buyer does not respond within the store’s stated window. Under the merchant’s documented policy, that justifies cancellation. The reviewer cancels, checks the Canceled Orders tab, confirms the result in the store admin and tells the dispatch team to follow the cancellation process. Nobody records the buyer as fraudulent. The order was stopped on policy and evidence.
A Review Queue Growing Faster Than the Team Can Clear It
Volume spikes and the queue outruns the reviewers. The merchant considers workflow automation for specific RTO risk types. Before saving conditions, the owner checks which tier will be routed to hold, how many orders the team can realistically review in a day, and which exceptions still need a human. More automated cancellations may avoid some dispatch costs while also rejecting genuine buyers. Check both outcomes before tightening the policy.
PRO-TIP: Audit a sample of cancelled and held orders alongside shipped orders. A lower RTO rate can hide lost genuine sales if the policy rejects too many orders before dispatch.
How Should You Measure Whether COD Review Is Helping?
Measure COD review using mature shipment outcomes and the cost of the review policy. Track RTO rate, delivered orders, cancelled orders, held-order ageing, review time and customer impact together. Compare similar order cohorts after delivery outcomes have had time to settle, and record changes in courier mix, geography and sales campaigns.
Keep the Denominators Clear
- COD RTO rate: returned-to-origin COD shipments divided by COD shipments dispatched in a cohort whose outcomes are sufficiently mature.
- Delivery rate: delivered COD shipments divided by dispatched COD shipments in the same cohort.
- Pre-dispatch cancellation rate: cancelled COD orders divided by COD orders placed in the selected cohort.
- Held-order ageing: time each order remains unresolved; report the distribution and the overdue count against your defined service target.
- Review time: time from queue entry to a recorded decision.
- Customer impact: track known false-positive cancellations and complaints separately. The true false-positive rate stays unknown without ground truth.
Use the same cohort definition in each comparison. Do not compare a rate for dispatched COD shipments with one calculated from all orders placed. Record how pending deliveries, pre-dispatch cancellations and returns after successful delivery are treated, and keep those rules consistent across periods.
Calculate Costs With Merchant Data
Take 1,000 mature dispatched COD shipments with 180 RTOs. That is an 18% RTO rate. If a later cohort records 150 RTOs out of 1,000 dispatched shipments, the rate is 15%, a 3 percentage-point difference. This is illustrative arithmetic, not a Razorpay result or a causal estimate.
Compare shipping and reverse-logistics costs, review labour, lost margin from cancelled genuine orders and any contracted product charges. Confirm actual pricing and any separate RTO Protection eligibility, exclusions and claim process in the terms agreed for your account before including either. Approving an order does not establish reimbursement coverage.
Use Dashboard Analytics Alongside Your Own Cohort Records
The COD Order Review Report shows approved, cancelled, held and unreviewed orders when manual review is selected, for up to the last 90 days. The Risk Report provides RTO risk distribution for manual review and a breakdown of risky users. The documentation describes these as view-only widgets; use your own order and shipment records for longer-term analysis.
The RTO Insights guide describes separate cost-saved widgets for COD Intelligence and manual review. Its editable default shipping-charge example appears under COD Intelligence. Confirm which input applies to your account and compare widget estimates with actual shipping and review costs; they are not a demonstrated net-profit result. Delivery data must be supplied manually or through a supported logistics integration for the relevant reporting.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Does Approving a COD Order in Magic Checkout Mean?
Approving records that the order has been reviewed. The manual-review guide states there is no change to the order itself, so approval is a review record rather than a fulfilment trigger. Continue your normal platform and fulfilment checks. Approval is not confirmation that COD cash has been collected, and it does not guarantee delivery.
Can I Hold a COD Order While Confirming the Address?
Yes. The manual-review documentation explicitly describes holding an order while you clarify an incorrect address, then deciding whether to approve or cancel once the detail is confirmed. Assign someone to follow up through your store’s approved channel, record the outcome in your own system, and verify the resulting platform state before anything is dispatched.
Can Approve, Hold and Cancel Actions Be Automated?
The COD Orders Review Workflow supports mapping RTO risk types to actions after manual review is enabled. Each risk type can carry one action, while the same action can apply to several risk types. This automation sits inside manual review and is distinct from choosing COD Intelligence as the alternative operating mode.
Does Razorpay Card AVS Verify an Indian COD Delivery Address?
No. Razorpay’s documented card AVS checks billing-address details against card-issuer records and is available for US, UK and Canada cards. For COD order decisions, use the Magic Checkout review workflow and your own customer clarification process. Neither address autofill nor an RTO risk label guarantees that a delivery address is deliverable.
Will Holding or Cancelling an Order Automatically Stop My Shipping App?
Do not assume it will. The documented store mapping depends on the ecommerce platform, and a hold on Shopify is described as a tag rather than a fulfilment block. Check the effect in your own order management and shipping integrations, then apply your store’s dispatch controls.
