How do I set up Cash on Delivery (COD) and charge or skip VAT?

What Cash on delivery does

The Cash on delivery (COD) app adds a no-card payment option to your checkout. Buyers select it, place the order, and pay the delivery rider in cash when the parcel arrives. There is no payment gateway, no card credentials, and no transaction fee involved, so it works well in markets where most customers prefer to pay on receipt.

Installing and activating Cash on delivery

1. Open Apps in the left-hand menu.
2. Find Cash on delivery and click it.
3. Click Install in the preview modal and confirm.
4. The settings modal opens. Turn the Activate toggle on.
5. Click Save.

Once saved, Cash on delivery appears as a payment option at your store's checkout. You need the apps permission to install or change it; staff without it see a permission error.

The only setting: Activate

Cash on delivery has a single control:

• Activate: when on, buyers can choose cash on delivery at checkout. When off, the option is hidden but the app stays installed.

There are no API keys, no bank details, and no account fields to enter. This is the difference from card gateways like Stripe, PayPal, CMI, and Paystack, which all require connecting an account or entering credentials (for example CMI asks for a Client ID and Store key). COD needs none of that.

How a COD order is recorded

When a buyer completes a cash on delivery order, Storeep records it directly with pending status, ready for you to confirm and fulfill. Cash on delivery does not wait for a payment confirmation, so it never sits in the abandoned state on purpose.

This is the opposite of the online card gateways. Orders paid with Stripe, PayPal, CMI, or Paystack are held as abandoned until the gateway confirms the payment, then they move to pending. A COD order skips that wait.

A separate abandoned order is a cart a shopper started but never finished (for example they left during an upsell offer). Those are not completed COD sales. You can recover them with the Automator app, described below.

Cash on delivery and VAT

VAT is set per market, not in the COD app. Open Settings > Markets, pick a market, then open its VAT panel. Key behavior:

• You enter the VAT rate as a percentage value (for example 20 for 20%). The default is 0.
• VAT is applied to the shopping cart of each order in that market, but only for taxable products.
• If the VAT rate is 0%, it does not show up in shopping carts at all.
• The rate is per country: each market carries its own VAT value.

Whether a product is taxed is controlled per product. In a product's settings, the Taxable toggle decides it: when Taxable is on, tax for that product is calculated at checkout using the rate set for each country. When it is off, the product is never taxed, even in a market with a non-zero VAT rate.

The Fast Checkout exemption

Fast Checkout is the buy-now flow that skips the cart and lets a customer purchase a single product immediately from the product or landing page. The VAT panel notes that if you are using Fast Checkout for COD, customers can purchase without VAT. In practice, control the outcome with the two settings above:

• To sell a product tax-free, turn its Taxable toggle off. No VAT is added in any checkout flow.
• To remove VAT for a whole market, set that market's VAT rate to 0%, which also hides it from carts.
• To charge VAT, keep the product Taxable and give the market a non-zero rate. VAT is then calculated on the taxable lines at the market rate in both Fast Checkout and the regular cart checkout.

Recovering abandoned carts with Automator

The Automator app (installed separately from the Apps marketplace) can turn abandoned carts and orders into pending automatically, so you do not have to chase every dropped checkout by hand.

1. Install the Automator app.
2. Turn on Auto changer abandoned orders.
3. Set the Recovery time slider, allowed range is 10 to 60 minutes (default 20).
4. Save. Any abandoned cart or order is then changed to pending after that delay and sent to all connected services and apps.

Keep the recovery time generous. A value at the low end of the range can flip a checkout that a shopper is still actively completing.

Pitfalls to avoid

• Cash on delivery does not verify payment. A buyer can place an order and refuse delivery, so track your COD return rate in the Orders section.
• If you connect courier apps that pull orders automatically, make sure Automator's recovery time leaves enough buffer before orders are dispatched.
• If a product unexpectedly shows VAT at checkout, check both its Taxable toggle and the market's VAT rate, since both must align for tax to apply.