Reducing RTO from 35% to 8% — Exact Steps

Client: A skincare D2C brand doing 2,500 orders/month, 65% COD. RTO rate: 35%. Monthly RTO loss: ₹2,83,500.

After implementing our 8-step RTO reduction playbook, their RTO dropped to 8% within 6 weeks. Here’s exactly what we did.

Week-by-Week Implementation

Week 1: WhatsApp COD Verification

• Integrated GoKwik for automated WhatsApp COD confirmation
• Every COD order gets: “Reply YES to confirm your order of ₹[amount]”
• Orders not confirmed in 12 hours: auto-cancelled
• Immediate result: 380 orders cancelled before shipping (15% of COD orders were fake). RTO impact: -15%

Week 2: Prepaid Incentives

• Added “Save ₹50 — Pay Online” at checkout via Releasit COD Form
• Added ₹40 COD handling fee
• Result: Prepaid ratio shifted from 35% to 48%. 13% more orders with near-zero RTO risk.

Week 3: Address Scoring + Pin Code Restrictions

• Activated GoKwik’s AI risk scoring
• Blocked COD for pin codes with >40% historical RTO rate
• Required IVR verification for orders above ₹1,500
• Result: Flagged 8% of orders as high-risk. 90% of flagged orders would have been RTO.

Week 4: NDR Automation

• Set up WhatsApp NDR flow: instant message after failed delivery attempt
• Customer can update address or preferred time slot via WhatsApp
• If no response in 24 hours: IVR call
• Result: Recovered 22% of failed deliveries that would have been RTO.

Week 5-6: Data Analysis and Optimization

• Analyzed RTO by Meta ad campaign — found 2 campaigns with 50%+ RTO (likely click farms). Paused them.
• Built blacklist of 340 phone numbers with repeat RTO history
• Adjusted pin code restrictions based on 5 weeks of data

Results After 6 Weeks

Metric	Before	After	Improvement
RTO rate (COD)	35%	8%	-77% reduction
Monthly RTO cost	₹2,83,500	₹48,000	₹2,35,500 saved/month
Prepaid order ratio	35%	52%	+17 percentage points
Fake/cancelled orders (pre-ship)	0	380/month	380 shipments saved
Recovered NDR orders	0	~85/month	85 extra deliveries

Annual savings: ₹28.3 lakh. Cost of verification stack: ₹7,000/month (₹84,000/year). ROI: 33x.

Want RTO results like this?

The 33x ROI on the verification stack isn’t hard to replicate — it’s the same ₹7,000/month tooling running on every Shopify build we ship for COD-heavy categories. The work is in the integration: WhatsApp confirmation flow, address scoring, prepaid incentive copy, NDR retry logic, and the dashboard that lets you see RTO by pincode. We’ve done it for 200+ Indian D2C brands. ₹385Cr+ revenue processed. 4.5x average ROI. 98% retention.

The Shopify build is ₹50,000 fixed-price with no AMC — bug fixes for what we ship are included for the lifetime of the store.

Start a WhatsApp chat: Message the Growww Tech team on WhatsApp →

Related reading:

• RTO Reduction Playbook
• Filter Fake COD Orders
• RTO Crisis Survival Guide