Three costs quietly eat a Nepali seller's month: orders from people who never intended to pay, orders that were never processed at all, and bills that were wrong. None of them show up as a line in your accounts. They show up as the feeling that you are busier than last year but no better off.
1. Fake and abandoned COD orders
Cash on delivery is essential in Nepal — and it is also the easiest order to place and abandon. Someone orders in a moment of interest, then does not answer the phone when the rider arrives. You have paid for packing and delivery both ways and get nothing.
What reduces it:
- Verify the phone number at checkout, so a wrong or invented number cannot complete an order.
- Confirm before dispatch for high-value COD — one message or call converts a casual click into a commitment.
- Keep a history per customer, so the same number that refused three deliveries is visible before you send the fourth.
- Offer a small prepaid incentive — free delivery for paying via wallet shifts a share of orders away from COD entirely.
The important part is the record. Without one customer history, a repeat refuser is invisible and you keep paying to learn the same lesson.
2. Orders that were simply missed
The most expensive order is the one nobody saw. It happens when orders arrive across several places — a website, a Facebook comment, an Instagram DM, a Viber message, someone phoning the shop — and there is no single list. One channel gets checked less often, and a paying customer waits two days for a reply they never get.
The fix is structural, not a matter of trying harder: every order, whatever channel it came from, lands in one list with a status — new, packed, dispatched, delivered. If it is not in the list, it does not exist; if it is in the list, it cannot be forgotten. That single discipline recovers more revenue than most ad budgets.
3. Billing mistakes
Billing errors are the quietest loss because they usually favour the customer and nobody complains. The usual causes:
- Prices typed by hand at the counter, from memory or a printed sheet that is out of date.
- Discounts applied inconsistently — one staff member rounds down, another does not.
- VAT added wrongly, or forgotten on a bill that needed it.
- Delivery charges guessed rather than calculated by destination.
Each is small. Repeated across every transaction of a busy month, they are not. The remedy is to stop treating a bill as something a person composes: the price comes from the product record, the discount from a defined rule, the tax from a setting, and the delivery charge from the address — so the till produces the same correct bill regardless of who is standing at it.
Why these three are really one problem
Fake customers, missed orders and wrong bills all come from the same root: information that lives in someone's head or in a chat thread instead of in a system. Put customers, orders and prices in one place and all three shrink at once — you can see who has refused delivery before, no channel is unwatched, and no one is doing arithmetic under pressure.
The short version
Verify phone numbers and confirm high-value COD before dispatch; funnel every channel into a single order list with statuses; and let the system, not the staff member, calculate the bill. These are boring changes that pay every single day.
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