Cash on delivery is not going away in the Gulf, and honestly, it should not. For a huge share of customers, especially first-time buyers who have never handed a card number to your store, COD is the reason they trusted you enough to order at all. The problem was never that COD exists. The problem is that almost no store measures what it actually costs, per channel, per product, per campaign, until the number is too large to ignore.
The mechanic that hides the cost
Here is the mechanic that hides the cost. An order gets placed, counted as a sale the moment it is confirmed, and shows up as revenue in every dashboard you own. Weeks later, the courier arrives, the customer is not home, or has changed their mind, or never really intended to buy and just clicked through curiosity, and the order is refused at the door. By the time that refusal is recorded, if it is recorded at all, it has long since dropped out of the conversation. The campaign that "drove" that sale already got its credit. Nobody goes back and un-credits it.
The refusal rate is not evenly spread, and this is the part that makes it dangerous rather than just an operating cost. Cheap impulse products sold to cold traffic on aggressive ad campaigns refuse at far higher rates than the same products sold to a customer who found you through search, a referral, or a repeat purchase. This means COD refusal concentrates precisely on the campaigns that look most exciting on a top-line dashboard: high volume, low price point, fast growth. The campaigns quietly bleeding margin from refusals are often the same ones getting more budget because their raw order count looks great.
Rizecart treats COD refusal as a first-class cost in the true-profit calculation, not an afterthought. Every channel's profit number already has its actual, measured refusal rate baked in, not an industry-average guess. When the audit finds a campaign whose reported ROAS looks strong but whose true profit is negative once refusals and shipping-both-ways costs are counted, that finding gets a name and a number: this campaign is bleeding roughly this many riyals a month, and here is why.
The fix is rarely "stop offering COD," which would cost you far more in lost trust than it saves. The fix is targeting: know which channels and which products carry high refusal risk, and either price for it, add a small prepaid incentive, or simply stop feeding ad budget to the segment that reliably orders and reliably refuses. That is a decision you can only make once the cost is visible. Most stores are making it blind.