Cash on delivery in Europe: how to set it up and when it pays

Cash on delivery (COD) means the customer pays when the parcel is handed over or collected, and the carrier passes the money on to you. Lietuvos paštas's rules for business customers define a COD item as “pašto siunta, įteikiama gavėjui, kai jis sumoka siuntėjo nurodytą pinigų sumą” - a postal item handed to the recipient when they pay the amount the sender set. ^S13 For the shop, that brings three costs a payment taken at checkout does not have: a carrier fee, a wait for the money, and a parcel that comes back when the customer does not pay.

This article is for shops selling in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland. Fees and terms are quoted from each carrier's own pages as checked on 5 November 2026; where a carrier publishes no figure, the article says so rather than estimating one.

Where cash on delivery still matters

What share of online orders is paid on delivery has no good answer for this region: the figures that circulate trace back to vendor blogs or secondhand summaries of paid reports, none with a method that could be followed to its source. The closest usable number measures something else, the share of online stores that offer COD.

If 64.9% of Lithuanian online stores offer COD, shoppers there will often look for it, but the figure says nothing about how many choose it, and ECDB does not say how it counted. ^S1 Treat it as a direction, not a forecast.

The European Central Bank's consumer payment survey cannot fill the gap either. SPACE 2024 covered 40,981 respondents in 18 euro-area countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia among them, but where a shopper ordered online and paid the courier or paid on pickup, the survey recorded it as a point-of-sale payment, not an online one. ^S2 COD disappears into the in-shop figures. Poland is outside the euro area and not covered.

What the carriers are building says more than any survey. Omniva changed COD at its parcel machines in June 2026 so the customer pays in the Omniva app, which lets COD parcels go to machines without a payment terminal ^S12; Smartposti in Estonia takes COD payments at both its touchscreen and its keypad lockers ^S6; InPost's terms list four ways to pay for a COD parcel, cash among them. ^S11 That is investment, not a usage figure, and reading it as a sign that carriers expect COD to stay is our inference.

What the carrier charges, and when you get paid

COD is an additional service on top of the shipping price, ordered on your business contract. Of the carriers checked, three publish a fee. DPD Lietuva and Venipak publish how they pay out but not what they charge ^S5,S9, and the pages checked for Omniva and LP EXPRESS gave neither, so ask your account manager.

What that means on a €50 order

Worked through for a €50 COD order at published prices - our arithmetic, not the carriers': DPD Eesti's fee is €1.80 plus €0.50, or €2.30. Its energy and CPI surcharge, 23.06% for November 2026, applies to additional services as well as shipping, which takes the fee to about €2.83. ^S3,S4 DPD Eesti also charges a fuel surcharge fixed at 23%; its page does not say whether that applies to additional services, so it is left out, which may understate the fee. ^S4 Smartposti's fee is €1.05 plus €0.75, or €1.80 plus VAT. ^S6 InPost's is PLN 1.50 whatever the amount, up to PLN 5,000. ^S10 A percentage fee grows with the basket and a flat one does not, so the gap widens on large orders.

Then there is the wait. Unlike a payment taken at checkout, COD money arrives on the carrier's schedule, shown in the table's last column. ^S5,S6,S9,S11 Smartposti also bills its 1.5% on a monthly invoice rather than deducting it from the payout. ^S6 On a weekly schedule, money from an early-week delivery can wait most of a week plus bank time - our reading of the schedules, not a carrier figure.

What a refused parcel costs

A COD order is not paid until the parcel is handed over, so a customer who changes their mind can simply not pay or not collect. The carrier then sends the parcel back, and the published terms charge you for both trips.

• InPost returns a parcel that the recipient refuses or does not collect - a locker parcel is held for 48 hours - and charges “100% of the main service price” for the return. If the parcel is not picked up, the shipping, COD and cover fees are not refunded. ^S10,S11
• DPD Eesti lists refusing the shipment and not collecting it from a parcel locker among the causes of a failed delivery, and charges 75% of the initial transport price for the return. ^S4
• Smartposti charges business customers for returns “based on the same price list that applies when sending parcels”. ^S6
• Lietuvos paštas keeps an uncollected item for 30 calendar days and then sends it back; for a domestic parcel the return is charged at the domestic parcel tariffs then in force and added to the sender's invoice (“įtraukiamas į siuntėjui išrašomą sąskaitą”, added to the invoice issued to the sender). ^S13

Return terms for DPD Lietuva, Omniva, Venipak and LP EXPRESS were not found on their public pages; they will be in your contract. For the three carriers with published terms, here is one refused parcel at list prices.

So on these three carriers the two trips cost between 1.75 and 2 times the outbound shipping price, before any COD fee and surcharges - our arithmetic on their published terms ^S4,S6,S10 - and that is before the packaging and the time spent putting the item back on the shelf. The real cost of returns covers that second half.

When COD pays for itself

Whether that is worth it turns on two numbers only your own orders can give you: how many COD buyers would not have bought at all without it, and how many of them refuse. For the orders COD wins, it pays while the refusal share stays below m ÷ (m + R), where m is your margin on an accepted order after shipping and fees, and R is the cost of one refused parcel. With a hypothetical €12 margin and €6 refusal cost, the break-even is 12 ÷ 18, or 66.7%. For orders that would have been paid at checkout anyway, COD adds only cost: the fee, the wait and the refusals. This is arithmetic with made-up inputs, not a benchmark; no carrier, regulator or independent study found for this article publishes a COD refusal rate.

Setting it up on Shopify

Shopify treats COD as a manual payment method, alongside money orders and bank transfers: the customer chooses it at checkout, and you record the payment yourself once the money reaches you. ^S14

1. 1

   Add the payment method

   In the Shopify admin, go to Settings > Payments and, under Payment providers, select the manual payment method Cash on Delivery (COD). ^S14

2. 2

   Tell the customer what to expect

   Fill in Additional details, which appear at checkout, and Payment instructions, then activate the method. ^S14 Say whether your carrier takes card as well as cash.

3. 3

   Mark orders paid when the money arrives

   A COD order is marked Pending on the Orders page. When the carrier's payout arrives, open the order and mark it as paid. ^S14 The carrier's payout report makes the matching easier: DPD Lietuva emails one listing amounts, parcel numbers and consignees, and Smartposti issues one every Wednesday for the previous week. ^S5,S6

4. 4

   Decide who sees it

   To hide or rename COD for some orders, Shopify's route is a payment customization app from the Shopify App Store, set up under Settings > Payments > Payment customizations. It needs at least the Basic plan, and custom-built customization apps need Shopify Plus. ^S15 Which conditions you can use depends on the app.

“You aren't charged third-party transaction fees for manual payments,” Shopify's help centre says. ^S14 The same page does not describe a way to add a COD surcharge, so if you want one, check what your payment customization app supports rather than assuming it can.

The carrier side is separate: whatever creates your shipping labels has to know which orders are COD and for how much.

Setting it up on WooCommerce

WooCommerce has a Cash on Delivery payment method among its offline payments. ^S16

1. 1

   Turn it on

   Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Payments > Take offline payments, enable Cash on Delivery and click Manage. ^S16

2. 2

   Write what the customer sees

   Set the Title, Description and Instructions. ^S16

3. 3

   Limit it to methods that can collect

   Use Enable for shipping methods to choose “which shipping methods and rates will offer COD”, and decide whether to Accept for virtual orders. ^S16 This is where you keep COD off any shipping method whose carrier or lockers cannot collect the payment.

4. 4

   Complete orders only after payment

   WooCommerce sets COD orders to Processing “until payment is collected”. Confirm the money has arrived before setting an order to Completed. ^S16

The core settings above include no fee. For one, WooCommerce's documentation points to a separate extension, Advanced Cash on Delivery with Fee. ^S16

Cash on delivery to a parcel locker

Paying at a locker works differently on each network, and that decides which lockers you can offer a COD customer.

• InPost: the customer pays no later than collection, by Pay by Link, in the InPost Mobile app, in cash, or by card at a terminal at an InPost branch or with the courier. Some lockers and service points take COD only at certain times or not at all, and a COD parcel sent to one of them comes back to you, for a fee. ^S11
• Smartposti (Estonia): at a touchscreen locker the customer pays by bank card on the machine; at a keypad locker they get a payment link by SMS or email and pay by bank link or card. ^S6
• Omniva: since June 2026 the customer pays a COD parcel in the Omniva app before collecting it, which lets COD parcels go to parcel machines without a payment terminal, community parcel machines included. ^S12
• DPD Eesti: COD can be paid when collecting from a DPD parcel locker, by bank card except American Express. ^S3

So the locker list at checkout matters more for COD orders than for prepaid ones. A picker that shows every locker can send a COD customer to one that cannot take the payment, and on InPost's terms that parcel comes back at your cost ^S11 - our reading of how the two meet. Showing only COD-capable points once the customer has chosen COD avoids it. How to put lockers in the checkout at all is covered in parcel lockers at checkout.

Cutting refused parcels

No source checked for this article measures COD refusal rates, so what follows is practice, not a benchmark.

• Measure it per country and per carrier. Your refusal share is the one input the break-even above needs. Count refused and uncollected COD parcels every month.
• Know the collection window. InPost holds a locker parcel for 48 hours, with a reminder before the time runs out ^S11; Lietuvos paštas keeps an item for 30 calendar days. ^S13 On a short window, a slow customer becomes a return.
• Confirm large orders before you ship. A message asking the customer to confirm a high-value COD order costs less than shipping it both ways.
• Offer COD only where it can be collected. Limit it to the shipping methods and lockers that take payment, so no parcel comes back because the point could not collect. ^S11,S16
• Set your own ceiling. DPD Lietuva caps COD at €1,000 in cash and €3,000 by card, and InPost at PLN 5,000 ^S5,S10; your limit can sit lower if expensive orders are the ones that come back.
• Make prepaid the easy choice. Show card and bank payments before COD; Shopify's payment customization apps can reorder payment methods. ^S15

Where most stores offer COD, shoppers will look for it; where few do, it mainly adds a fee, a wait and the chance of a parcel coming back. The numbers that decide it are in your own orders and your carrier contract, not in market surveys.