Cash on Delivery (COD)

Cash on Delivery (COD) is the dominant payment method in Algerian e-commerce. With COD, the customer pays cash directly to the courier on delivery, and the courier later remits the collected funds to your bank or CCP account.

In DZBuild, COD is the payment method on every physical store — no payment gateway, no credentials, no integration to set up. It's the path of least friction for new merchants.

Digital-theme stores never use COD

COD applies to physical (non-Digital) stores. Orders on a Digital-theme store are always submitted as digital orders — with no payment attached, or as a receipt-upload payment when the customer pays through a method from the paid Payment Gateway addon — see Manual receipts.

How it works end-to-end

1. The customer places an order on your storefront. There is nothing to pick — COD is implicit: the checkout shows only a static note in the order summary (default "Payment on delivery", editable at /dashboard/customize → Checkout page on the Pro plan and above), and every physical-store order is recorded as Cash on Delivery.

2. The order lands in /dashboard/orders as pending.

3. You confirm the order (call-confirm or process directly) and ship it via your linked courier.

4. The courier delivers the parcel and collects the cash from the customer. What DZBuild declares as the collectible amount differs by provider family:

   • Yalidine, Yalitec, Guepex and Easy & Speed receive only the product subtotal, together with whether shipping is free — they add their own delivery tariff on top when collecting.
   • All other couriers — the Ecotrack tenants (DHD, Conexlog, MSM Go…), the Procolis family (ZR Express, Abex Express), Maystro, NOEST and Zimou — receive the order total including shipping.

   Check the declared amount on the parcel before assuming the courier will collect your shipping fee.

5. The courier remits the collected money to you directly, on its own schedule, minus the courier's delivery fee. DZBuild is not part of that payout.

6. The order walks the status ladder: pending → confirmed → processing → shipped → delivered, with returned and cancelled as the failure branches. Sending an order to delivery is what sets processing (orders sitting in pending or confirmed are moved automatically). shipped, delivered and returned are then set automatically from the courier's own tracking updates — you don't set them by hand.

DZBuild does not move the cash itself; the entire money leg is between you and the courier.

Enabling / disabling COD

COD cannot be turned off. On physical (non-Digital) stores every order is recorded as Cash on Delivery — there is no payment-gateway setting and no COD switch anywhere in the dashboard.

What you can change is the wording of the payment note shown in the checkout summary: /dashboard/customize → Checkout page → Payment method text (default "Payment on delivery" in your storefront's language). That field requires the Pro plan.

Controlling where COD is available and what the courier collects

Everything that decides whether a COD order can be placed — and how much cash the courier ends up collecting — lives on /dashboard/shipping.

• Per-wilaya Home / Desk switches. Every wilaya row has a Home delivery and a Desk delivery toggle. Switching both OFF and saving is the only supported way to stop serving a destination: the checkout then shows a "no delivery available" message for that wilaya and the order cannot be submitted.
• Do not delete a wilaya's rate row to block it. The checkout lists every wilaya regardless of which ones you priced, and a missing row falls back to 0 DA shipping with home AND desk delivery enabled — you would ship those orders for free instead of blocking them.
• Wilaya mode (58 or 69). This switches which list customers see at checkout: the historical 58 wilayas, or all 69 including the newer southern wilayas.
• Free shipping, store-wide or above a threshold, reduces the cash the courier collects — the customer pays the item total only.
• Weight surcharge. A heavy order adds to the shipping the customer pays on delivery. Rates and the two ways around it are in the next section.

The weight surcharge

This is the line merchants most often read as a DZBuild fee. It is not. Heavy parcels cost more to move, that is the courier's rule, and DZBuild applies it to the shipping figure your customer sees at checkout so the amount collected on delivery is right.

• The first 5 kg of the whole order are free. The allowance is counted once per order, not per product line: DZBuild adds up each item's weight times its quantity and charges only for what sits above 5 kg.
• Every extra kilo costs 50 DA.
• It costs 100 DA per extra kilo in the 13 deep-south wilayas (Adrar, Béchar, Tamanrasset, El Bayadh, Illizi, Tindouf, Naâma, Timimoun, Bordj Badji Mokhtar, Béni Abbès, In Salah, In Guezzam, Djanet), and only when your linked courier is Yalidine, Yalitec or Guepex. Every other courier stays at 50 DA in those wilayas too.

If it does not fit the way you sell, you have two ways out, both of them in your hands:

• Leave the product weight empty. A product with no weight, or a weight of 0, never triggers the surcharge. Weight is optional in the product editor.
• Let the order ship free. The surcharge is only added on top of a shipping fee, so an order with no shipping fee never carries one. That covers store-wide free shipping, an order above your free-shipping threshold, a product offer that includes free shipping, and pickup from store.

Where the cash gets collected

• Home delivery — the courier collects at the customer's address.
• Desk delivery — available on every store as a per-wilaya option: the customer travels to the courier's desk and pays there. Cheaper tariff and a lower return rate. The free Stop Desk addon lets the customer choose which desk. If no desk is picked, DZBuild resolves one for you on the Yalidine family (the customer's own commune first, then any desk in the wilaya) and only refuses the send when the wilaya has no desk at all; Ecotrack-family couriers simply receive the parcel with no desk id attached.
• Pickup from Store — an addon on the Unlimited plan. It adds a third option at checkout, on the product page and on landing pages: the customer collects at your own pickup point, free of delivery charges, and pays you directly.

Each of these changes who holds the cash, and therefore what you reconcile at payout time.

Reducing fake orders

COD is great for trust but invites bots and joke orders. Common defenses on DZBuild:

• The Captcha Protection addon (ALTCHA Sentinel) — invisible to humans, blocks bots and headless browsers on fast checkout, full checkout and every landing-page order form. Requires the Pro plan or higher. It has three security levels: Normal (invisible), High (also blocks VPN / proxy / Tor visitors) and Aggressive (shows a visible challenge on submit). Customers behind very strict network blockers or corporate firewalls may not be able to complete the check.
• The Limit Orders Per IP addon — caps successful orders from a single IP (default 3 per 12 hours). Available on every plan, including Free.
• The Advanced Order Management addon — a CRM-style queue at /dashboard/orders/advanced with call-attempt tracking, a full status timeline and 12 sub-statuses (no answer, busy line, postponed, fake, duplicate, customer cancelled, waiting customer call, at courier, returned, completed…), so you work a confirmation queue instead of guessing. Requires the Unlimited plan, and it is not available on the Digital theme.
• Filtering wilayas with high return rates if your numbers show a pattern.

Reconciling courier payouts

Each delivered COD order has:

• A subtotal (the COD amount the courier collected).
• A shipping fee (collected by the courier and either kept by them or passed to you, depending on your contract).
• A courier delivery fee (deducted before payout).

There is no CSV or Excel export button on /dashboard/orders. To get order data out for reconciliation, use the Google Sheets integration (/dashboard/addons → Google Sheets, Pro plan or higher): connect a Google account, pick or create a spreadsheet, and run an export — orders, products, customers, abandoned carts, orders + carts, or all. Then reconcile that sheet against the courier's statement when payouts arrive.

Frequently asked

Q: What happens if the customer refuses to pay on delivery? A: The courier returns the parcel to you, and the order moves to returned (or cancelled if you mark it). You typically pay the round-trip shipping fee to the courier. When the order moves to returned or cancelled, DZBuild automatically puts the stock back — provided the order had already reached confirmed or beyond, which is when the stock was reserved. An order cancelled while still pending never held stock, so nothing changes. Moving it back to confirmed / processing / shipped / delivered commits it again — you never adjust stock by hand for a refused COD parcel.

Q: Can the customer pay partially? A: No, COD is binary — full payment or refusal.

Q: How fast do I get paid? A: The courier pays you directly, on its own schedule. DZBuild is not involved in that payout and cannot speed it up, so check your contract with each courier for the exact cadence.

Q: Can I combine COD with online payment? A: No. DZBuild's Slick-Pay integration is a merchant-to-DZBuild rail only — it pays for your subscription, AI credits, paid addons and domains, and is never offered as a customer checkout option on your storefront. Physical storefront orders are always recorded as Cash on Delivery; there is no payment-method chooser at checkout. The only customer-facing non-COD flow is on Digital-theme stores that have bought the paid Payment Gateway addon: you define your own CCP / BaridiMob / RedotPay / custom accounts and the customer uploads a transfer receipt at checkout.

Q: Will my customers ever be able to pay by card at checkout? A: It is planned, and no date has been announced. Build on COD today, and on the receipt flow if you sell digital goods.

Q: Does DZBuild take a cut of a COD order? A: No. There is no commission on your sales at all: you pay for your plan, and the courier's delivery fee is a matter between you and the courier.

See Orders for the order lifecycle in detail and Couriers overview for how the cash leg ties to your linked courier.