Cash on delivery
method of package delivery where payment is made upon receipt
Cash on delivery (COD), sometimes called payment on delivery, cash on demand, payment on demand or collect on delivery is the sale of goods by mail order where payment is made on delivery rather than in advance. If the goods are not paid for, they are returned to the retailer. The term originally applied only to payment by cash, but as other forms of payment have become more common, the word "cash" has sometimes been replaced with the word "collect" to include transactions by checks, money orders, credit cards or debit cards.
Advantages and disadvantages for retailers
Advantages of COD for online or mail order retailers:
The customer does not need to own a credit card to purchase.
Impulse purchases may increase as payment is not due at the time of ordering.
The credibility of retailers may be increased because the consumer only has to pay when the item is delivered.
Disadvantages of COD for online or mail order retailers:
Orders might be returned as buyers are less committed to the purchase than if they had paid in advance (which led to the eventual elimination of C.O.D. with many TV offers in the United States and Canada by the early 1980s).
Logistics partners charge additional fees for COD orders.
Limits
Most operators impose a limit on the amount of money that can be collected per delivery or per day using COD services. Limits may be higher for non-cash payments.
“Cash on delivery” enters the record as method of package delivery where payment is made upon receipt. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cash, delivery and method can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Cash on delivery” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Cash, delivery and method provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1365416. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cash on delivery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.