Fake COD orders rarely show up on a merchant’s radar until the return-to-sender pile gets hard to ignore. By then, the cost has usually already stacked up quietly for months — a fee here, a wasted delivery attempt there, an afternoon spent reconciling stock that should have been sold. None of it looks dramatic in isolation. Add it up over a quarter, and it’s often one of the highest hidden costs in a COD-heavy store.
The good news is that fake orders aren’t a fact of life you have to accept as the price of offering cash on delivery. Most of them can be filtered out before they ever reach fulfillment, using a handful of methods that don’t require rebuilding your checkout from scratch.
The Real Cost of Fake Orders: RTS Fees, Inventory, Team Time, Morale
It’s easy to underestimate how much a fake order actually costs, because the expense shows up in several places instead of one clean line item.
There’s the direct cost first: carrier fees for both the outbound delivery attempt and the return journey when the customer doesn’t answer or refuses the package. Then there’s inventory sitting in transit or back on a shelf that should have turned into a completed sale. There’s the time your team spends reconciling returned stock, updating counts, and following up on orders that were never going to convert in the first place. And there’s a cost that’s harder to quantify but very real: team morale takes a hit when return-to-sender rates stay stubbornly high week after week, especially when the same patterns keep repeating.
For a store processing a couple hundred COD orders a month, even a fake order rate in the low teens adds up to a meaningful operational drag — not a rounding error.
Why Fake Orders Happen and Who Is Actually Responsible
Fake orders come from a mix of sources, and not all of them are malicious. Some are genuinely accidental — a customer double-taps a “place order” button, or fills out a form out of curiosity without intending to follow through. Some come from competitors or bots testing a store’s checkout. And some are intentional bad-faith orders, sometimes tied to promo abuse or targeted harassment of a specific merchant.
The responsibility question matters because it shapes the fix. If most of your fake orders are accidental, the answer is often a cleaner, clearer form. If they’re intentional, verification and blocking tools do more of the work. Most stores have a mix of both, which is why the methods below work best in combination rather than as a single silver bullet.
Method 1: OTP Phone Verification — How It Works and What to Expect
OTP (one-time password) verification sends a short code to the customer’s phone by SMS, which they have to enter to confirm the order before it’s placed. If the code isn’t entered, the order doesn’t go through.
It adds roughly 30 seconds to checkout, which is worth being upfront about — it does introduce a small amount of friction. In exchange, it filters out a significant share of fake, accidental, and low-intent orders before they ever reach your fulfillment queue. For stores in markets where fake order rates run high, this single setting tends to produce a fast, measurable drop in RTS numbers.
OTP isn’t something every store needs turned on by default. If fake orders are a real, ongoing problem in your market, the tradeoff is usually worth it. If they’re not, the extra step may cost you more completions than it saves you in prevented fraud — which is why this is a setting to configure deliberately, not just switch on because it exists.
Method 2: Order Confirmation Calls for High-Value or High-Risk Zones
A quick confirmation call works especially well for higher-value orders or delivery zones that have a history of return-to-sender problems. It doesn’t need to be applied to every order — that would slow down fulfillment for no reason on low-risk purchases.
The most efficient version of this method is selective: flag orders above a certain value, or from zones with elevated RTS history, and route only those for a confirmation call before dispatch. This keeps the extra step targeted at the orders where it actually reduces risk, rather than adding delay across the board.
Method 3: Geographic Restrictions by Province or Delivery Zone
Not every delivery zone behaves the same way. Some provinces or areas consistently show higher return-to-sender rates than others, whether because of delivery infrastructure, distance from fulfillment hubs, or patterns specific to that region.
Once you have enough order history to see which zones are underperforming, geographic restrictions let you limit or disable COD in those specific areas rather than adjusting your entire fraud policy store-wide. This is a more surgical fix than OTP or call verification — it doesn’t add friction for every customer, only for the specific delivery areas where fake or undeliverable orders are concentrated.
Method 4: Blocklist — Blocking Repeat Bad-Faith Orderers
Some fake orders aren’t one-off mistakes. They come from the same phone number or email address placing multiple fake orders over time, sometimes across different product listings.
A blocklist stops repeat offenders from placing new COD orders once they’ve been flagged. This won’t catch first-time bad actors, but it closes off a channel that would otherwise keep costing you money indefinitely. It’s a low-effort method to maintain once it’s set up, and it tends to have an outsized effect relative to how simple it is.
Method 5: Clean Form Design That Filters Low-Intent Buyers Naturally
This is the method that’s easiest to overlook, because it doesn’t feel like a fraud-prevention tool — it feels like basic UX. But form design does real filtering work on its own.
A long form with unnecessary required fields tends to produce more accidental or low-intent submissions, not fewer, because customers rush through fields they don’t understand the purpose of. A short, clear form — name, phone, address, and nothing else unless it’s genuinely needed — makes it easier for a customer to submit intentionally and harder to submit by accident. Clear field labels and a visible order summary before submission also reduce the “I didn’t realize I was placing an order” category of fake orders, which is more common than most merchants assume.
How Zotek COD Form Addresses Each Method in One Place
Configuring all five methods separately, across different tools, is where a lot of merchants lose momentum. Zotek COD Form brings OTP verification, geographic restrictions, and blocklist controls into the same form-builder interface used to design the checkout experience itself, so fraud prevention and form design aren’t managed as two disconnected systems.
That matters less for what any single feature does — most COD apps offer some version of OTP or blocking — and more for how quickly a merchant can actually configure and adjust these settings without switching between multiple tools or waiting on developer support to make a change.
What to Do When Fake Orders Still Slip Through
No combination of these methods gets you to zero. Some fake orders will still get through, and that’s expected rather than a sign something’s broken.
When that happens, the useful response is to log the pattern — phone number, delivery zone, order value, time of day — rather than treating each incident in isolation. Patterns let you tighten geographic restrictions or expand your blocklist with evidence behind the decision, rather than reacting to fraud with broad rules that also block legitimate customers.
It’s also worth revisiting your fraud settings periodically rather than setting them once and leaving them alone. Order volume, delivery zones, and the sources of fake orders all shift over time, and a fraud-prevention setup that worked well six months ago may need adjusting as your store grows.
Final Thoughts
Fake COD orders are expensive in ways that don’t always show up on a single line of a report, which is exactly why they’re easy to underestimate. The fix isn’t a single tool — it’s a combination of verification, targeted friction where it matters, and a form clean enough that legitimate customers rarely trigger it by accident. None of the five methods above needs to be perfect on its own. Together, they cover most of what causes fake orders in the first place.
CTA: Protect your store with Zotek COD Form’s fraud prevention tools