COD delivery rate

What does delivery rate actually measure?

Delivered and paid orders divided by shipped orders, for a given period of time, expressed as one clear percentage that summarizes the whole shipping stage in a single figure. If 132 parcels shipped this week and 96 were delivered and paid in full, delivery rate is 73%, meaning 27% came back to you as a return of some kind rather than converting into cash collected. It measures what happens after a parcel leaves your hands entirely: whether the carrier reached the customer successfully on the attempt, whether the address held up under a real delivery attempt in the field, whether the customer accepted at the door once the driver arrived with the parcel. It says nothing about the stages before shipping, which is exactly why it needs to sit alongside confirmation rate rather than replace it as the only number a store watches from week to week.

Why does it matter whether you shipped confirmed or unconfirmed orders?

Because mixing them together in one figure makes the number essentially impossible to act on with any real precision. If some of what shipped was never confirmed in writing beforehand, a low delivery rate could actually be a confirmation problem wearing a delivery-rate label in your reports, since those orders were never real commitments and were always going to return regardless of address quality or driver performance on the day of the attempt. Once shipping is restricted to confirmed orders only, delivery rate becomes a much cleaner signal of the two things that actually cause a confirmed order to fail: address quality at the point of collection, and shipping speed after confirmation happens.

What is a meaningful drop versus normal variation?

A single bad week is not necessarily a trend worth reacting to immediately with a major process change, especially at lower order volumes where a handful of returns swings the percentage significantly in either direction from one week to the next. Look for a drop that holds across two or more weeks in a row before treating it as real, or one that lines up clearly with a specific change: a new address collection form rolled out, a new carrier added to the mix, expansion into new wilayas your existing carrier serves less reliably than its core northern routes. A one-week dip with no accompanying change behind it is more often noise than genuine signal, and chasing noise wastes effort that could go toward a real, sustained problem worth fixing.

How should delivery rate be broken down to be useful?

A single national delivery-rate number can look perfectly acceptable on the surface while hiding a specific wilaya or a specific carrier that is dragging the average down without anyone on the team noticing until much later. Breaking it apart by these three dimensions usually surfaces a specific, fixable gap rather than leaving you with only a vague sense that delivery "could be better" without knowing where to actually start looking for the cause.

What should you do once you find a weak segment?

Isolate it and test one change at a time rather than changing several things at once and losing track of what actually helped and what did not matter at all. If a specific wilaya underperforms consistently across several weeks, check whether that carrier actually offers reliable home delivery there or only stopdesk pickup, and adjust what you offer customers in that wilaya accordingly rather than assuming the same options apply everywhere in the country equally. If a specific carrier underperforms on comparable routes against a competitor carrier, that is a data point worth bringing to them directly, since carriers do track their own delivery performance internally and can often explain or address a persistent gap once it is shown to them with real numbers rather than a vague complaint with no evidence behind it.