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Website with cash on delivery: pros and cons for an online shop
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Anyone searching "website with cash on delivery" has usually already decided to offer it, maybe because a customer asked or a competitor shows it at checkout. The question that actually matters, before turning it on, is different: what does it really cost, and how many customers will use it often enough to justify that cost?
A payment method that keeps getting rarer
Cash on delivery, meaning paying the courier in cash when the package arrives, has a reputation the numbers no longer back up. According to the NetRetail 2025 research by Netcomm and the Politecnico di Milano's eCommerce B2c Observatory, presented on April 15, 2025, 89% of online transactions in Italy happen at the time of order, and only 11% opt for payment on delivery or on use of the service. Within that 11%, cash payments on delivery, the classic cash-on-delivery option, make up just 1.2%: the rest are deferred bank transfers and other delayed payment forms. The same research's 2026 press release confirms cash on delivery keeps declining toward marginal levels, without giving a new precise percentage.
That's not a number that says "nobody wants it anymore": a shop processing thousands of orders a month can still have dozens of customers asking for it. It does say that, if offered, it now serves a real but small and measurable minority, not the widespread demand it may have covered a few years ago.
What it actually costs, courier by courier
Transparency varies a lot here. Poste Italiane publishes its figures on its business price list (checked September 20, 2026): with Poste Delivery Standard, the cash-on-delivery service costs €2.27 when the amount is credited to a postal current account, with different figures for a postal cheque or money order, up to a maximum collectible amount of €999 per shipment. With Poste Delivery Express the cost rises to €4.10 plus VAT for the same type of credit, under the same ceiling.
BRT, GLS and SDA, by contrast, don't publish a figure on their sites. GLS's own pages explicitly call the cash-on-delivery cost "indicative": the actual price only comes with a quote request. SDA's General Conditions of Carriage point instead to the "sales form", meaning the individual commercial contract signed with each customer. In practice: before writing "cash on delivery available" on your site, it's worth asking your own courier what it really costs, because it isn't a figure you'll find by searching online.
The risk cash on delivery shifts onto the merchant
There's a structural difference between a card payment and a cash-on-delivery one, and it's the part that weighs most on the numbers: with a card, the merchant knows the amount was authorized before the package even ships. With cash on delivery, the courier collects nothing until the parcel is actually handed to whoever ordered it. If the recipient refuses it, isn't home, or changed their mind, the merchant has already paid for the packaged product and the outbound shipping, and in most cases the return leg too.
SDA's own General Conditions of Carriage say this without ambiguity: the cash-on-delivery service fee stays due to the courier even when the recipient refuses to accept the shipment. A failed delivery, then, doesn't just cost the missed payment: it also costs the service that was supposed to generate it.
The payment isn't credited right away
Something else anyone turning on cash on delivery usually finds out after the fact, not before: the amount the courier collects doesn't land in the merchant's account the same day as delivery. For SDA, again under its own general conditions, the timing and method of remitting cash-on-delivery amounts depend on what was agreed in the contract or, failing that, on the courier's standard commercial practice: there's no public standard that applies to everyone equally. That's a cash-flow detail, not just an accounting one: anyone selling on tight margins needs to know how many days pass between delivery and remittance before promising cash on delivery as if it were money collected on the spot.
When it's still worth offering
Cash on delivery remains a reasonable choice in specific cases: an audience buying for the first time from a shop they don't know and unwilling to hand over card details before seeing the package, a lower-value product where a missed payment barely dents overall margin, or an explicit, recurring request from real customers, not a hypothetical one. Outside those cases, the service cost, the risk of a refused package and the delay in getting paid outweigh what's left of a slice of demand that, per the most recent data, sits under two percent of Italian transactions.
Anyone still deciding how to take payments on their online shop at all, cards, wallets or bank transfer, before even getting to cash on delivery, will find the full breakdown of fees in how much does an e-commerce cost: cash on delivery, when it's worth adding, sits on top of those, not in place of them.
The guarantee
Thirty days to change your mind.
In more than ten years I have never had a client unhappy with the work delivered. That is why I can afford to say this: you have 30 days from accepting the quote to stop, or until the shop goes live if that comes first. Within that window I refund everything you have paid and we part ways, with no further claim and no argument. There are no conditions to meet and nothing to prove: you decide.
You get me, within one working day.
No switchboard, no support form. If you write or call and I do not answer within one working day, you do not pay that month.
I take the risk at the start. It is the only way I have to say “trust me” and have it mean something.
Where to start
Before writing "cash on delivery available" on your site, get a real figure from your own courier, not an estimate found online, and estimate how many orders a month would actually use it. If that number is low and the margin per order is tight, cash on delivery costs more than it brings in. If you already have customers asking for it, get in touch and let's work out together whether it's worth turning on, and with which courier.