Cash on Delivery (COD) for Thai online sellers: fees, signup, and payout times per courier

COD stands for Cash on Delivery. The customer orders without paying, the seller ships first, and the courier collects payment at the door. The courier then deducts its own service fee and transfers the remainder to the seller's bank account on its own schedule.

What separates COD from prepayment is that the seller releases stock before receiving money. The window between dispatch and payout is where working capital sits idle and where money goes missing. If the customer refuses the parcel, the seller gets goods back instead of cash.

COD is popular in Thailand because buyers do not have to risk transferring money first. For sellers it genuinely closes sales — but the service fee and the return risk have to be priced in from the start.

The requirements are near-identical across couriers, because they all come down to one thing: the courier needs to know whose bank account to pay.

As an individual, prepare a copy of your national ID card and a copy of the bank book in the same name. If you have legally changed your name, include the supporting document.

As a company, prepare the company registration certificate, signed ID copies of the authorised directors, a power of attorney if someone else is applying on your behalf, and a company bank account copy.

Most couriers handle signup in their own app or in the payment settings of their seller portal. Verification usually takes at least one business day, and COD shipping is unavailable until approval lands — worth allowing for before you start selling.

The honest answer is that it depends on the courier. There is no single rule that holds across all of them.

Some couriers state on their own terms page that the COD fee applies only when collection succeeds, so a refused parcel carries no COD fee. Meanwhile several widely-read guides state flatly that the seller absorbs both outbound and return shipping. Those two positions contradict each other.

So do not take a blanket rule from any one article. Open the terms page of the courier you actually use and read the section on refused and returned parcels specifically — this cost eats real margin and it is calculated differently by each company.

What you can control is the refusal rate itself: confirm orders before shipping, state the collection amount clearly, and keep a record of customers who have refused deliveries before.

The two terms get used interchangeably, but they describe different layers of the job.

A courier's COD service is what the courier provides: collecting payment from the customer on the seller's behalf and transferring it back on that courier's own schedule. Its scope ends at the parcels handed to that one courier.

A COD system sits on the seller's side. It knows which orders went out cash-on-delivery, for how much, with which courier, whether the money has arrived, and which parcels came back. Put simply: the courier service makes collection possible, the system tells you whether collection actually completed.

With one courier and modest volume, a spreadsheet still handles this. Across several couriers at once — each with its own fee rate, payout cycle, and returns policy — the number of line items to match grows faster than anyone can reconcile by hand. That is the point where a system earns its place.

Four things a working COD system has to do: pull parcel status from every courier into one place, match tracking numbers against money actually received, flag orders past their payout window with nothing paid, and record fees and return shipping as real costs.