Cash on Delivery (ramburs): Why It Eats Your Margin and How to Move Customers to Prepayment

Ask any online store owner in Moldova what their number-one payment method is, and the answer is almost always the same: ramburs — cash on delivery. COD looks like the ideal option: the customer needs no card, enters no sensitive data, pays only when the product is in their hands, and you pay no processing fee. It looks free. That's exactly the trap: cash on delivery is by far the most expensive payment method you have. It's just that, unlike a card fee, its cost never shows up on any invoice. It leaks, quietly, out of your margin — through returns, wasted courier runs, cash frozen for weeks, and orders placed on impulse and cancelled at the door.

This article explains, with real numbers from the Moldovan market, where the loss comes from, why COD still dominates anyway, and — the practical part — how to gradually cut your dependence on it and move customers toward prepayment, without scaring people off or losing the sale.

Where we actually are in 2026

E-commerce in Moldova is growing fast, but from a small base. Online sales reached about MDL 8.93 billion in 2024 (roughly EUR 464 million), up 15% year on year, and the number of online stores passed 2,800 by mid-2025 — effectively doubling in two years. Even so, e-commerce penetration of total retail is still around 5.7%, the lowest in Europe. In short: there's plenty of room to grow, but a buyer who is only just getting used to paying online.

The payment picture reflects exactly this transition. Cards came to represent more than half of payment volume in 2025 — a clear sign things are moving toward digital. And yet nearly 45% of online stores recorded no card payment at all in the first half of 2025. In other words, at almost half of all stores, COD isn't one option among several — it's the only thing that really happens. And in rural areas, cash on delivery remains clearly dominant.

Why COD costs you far more than you think

The first and biggest cost is returns. When payment only happens on delivery, the customer's commitment at the moment of ordering is almost zero. It's easy to order three sizes "just to see," or to order on an evening impulse and change your mind by morning. The result shows in the data: cash-on-delivery orders push the return rate toward 18% — several times higher than prepaid orders. Every refused parcel means a round-trip courier run that you pay for, a product coming back to stock (if it can still be resold), and days in which the goods were tied up for nothing.

The second cost is reverse logistics — everything that happens to a parcel that comes back. Repackaging, checking, returning to stock, sometimes cleaning or repair. It's labor, time, transport paid a second time — for an order that brought in nothing. The third cost, less visible, is cash flow: with COD, your money sits with the courier or the post office and reaches you days or even weeks later, depending on the contract. You've sold, but you don't have the cash yet — and meanwhile you have to buy new stock. On top of that comes fraud risk and phantom orders: fake addresses, wrong numbers, people who order and vanish. With prepayment, those orders simply don't exist.

So why is COD still so popular

Because it solves a real problem: trust. A buyer who doesn't know you, who has heard stories about stores that take the money and don't deliver, feels protected paying only once they see the product. Cash on delivery is, in effect, an insurance policy the customer takes out at your expense. Add to that habit — many Moldovans have bought this way for years — and access: some customers, especially outside the big cities, genuinely don't use cards online.

The important takeaway is that you can't, and shouldn't, remove COD overnight. If you cut it abruptly, you lose precisely the customers who have no other option. The right goal isn't "ban cash on delivery," it's "make prepayment more attractive than COD, for as many people as possible." It's a shift in proportion, not a switch.

How to move customers to prepayment — without losing the order

The first lever is choosing the right modern prepayment methods. Here, the biggest news for a Moldovan store is MIA Instant Payments, the instant payment system launched by the National Bank of Moldova and available to businesses since the second half of 2024. MIA moves money from account to account in seconds, 24/7, via a simple QR code or phone number, and — unlike a card — comes with much lower fees. Within two years, nearly half the country's adults were using it, so the user base already exists. The official details on how the system works are at the National Bank of Moldova, and we've written in depth on how to integrate it into your store in our guide to MIA Instant Payments for the online store.

The second lever is making prepayment concretely more worthwhile. A small discount for paying online (free shipping, say, or a token reduction for paying now) changes behavior more than any persuasive copy. The math is on your side: if a returned parcel costs you two courier runs plus handling, you can afford to give part of that saving to the customer who pays upfront. For large orders, installment payments are a powerful ally — the customer pays upfront, but in tranches, so the "I don't have the full sum right now" objection disappears without going back to COD.

The third lever is trust, because trust is the real reason people choose COD. The more serious your store looks, the smaller the need to "pay only when I see it." Visible real reviews, a clear and fair returns policy, genuine contact details, a product page that answers every question — all of these reduce fear. When the customer trusts you, prepayment stops being a risk; it's just more convenient. And finally, always offer COD as an option, but not as the default option: put online payment first in the list, pre-selected.

What to do with the COD that remains

Even after moving some customers to prepayment, a slice of orders will stay on ramburs — and that's fine. Here the goal is to cut losses. Confirm high-value orders with a short message or call before shipping: a simple "confirm your order?" on WhatsApp or by phone cuts out a share of phantom orders. Track customers who systematically refuse parcels and, where needed, require prepayment on their future orders. Tie all of this to your delivery strategy and your inventory management, because a parcel stuck on COD is stock you can't sell to anyone else. And remember that many refusals are actually decided before delivery — at checkout: a clunky ordering process increases both abandoned carts and orders placed in a hurry and cancelled afterward.

Cash on delivery isn't an enemy — it's a stage. It was the natural answer in a market where trust in online shopping was only being built, and it will remain necessary for some customers for a long time yet. But if you treat it as your default payment method, you quietly pay a tax on every order: returns, double transport, frozen cash. The smart move in 2026 is to make prepayment the obvious choice for as many people as possible — with MIA, with cards, with installments — and leave ramburs where it's genuinely needed. The XCORE.MD team can help you set up payments in your store, integrate MIA and installments, and configure checkout so that prepayment is the first choice, not the exception.