Egypt is the biggest ecommerce market in North Africa, on course to pass $14 billion by 2026. It is also the market where the standard cash-on-delivery playbook is wrong, and following it costs real money.
The reason is one fact most COD guides skip: in Egypt, a customer who wants to pay cash does not have to pay it at the door.
COD is dominant here, and it is shrinking
Cash on delivery accounts for roughly 45% of Egyptian ecommerce transactions. That is still the single largest payment method, and it is a long way from the 70–95% you see in Morocco and Algeria.
The gap is the whole story. In Algeria, COD is effectively the only way to get paid. In Egypt it is one option among several that ordinary people without credit cards actually use.
Cash does not have to mean cash on delivery
Fawry is the thing to understand. It is a payment network with reference-code cash payment accepted at more than 200,000 outlets across the country. The customer orders online, gets a code, walks to a kiosk or a shop, and hands over notes.
Read that again from your side of the counter. The customer pays in cash, because that is what they have and what they trust — and you get the money before you ship anything.
That single difference removes almost everything that makes COD expensive:
- No confirmation call. They already paid.
- No refusal at the door. There is no door step in the transaction.
- No return leg to fund.
- No COD collection fee.
- No waiting two weeks for the courier to remit your own money.
There is also ValU, the instalment service from CIB, which lets customers spread a purchase over as long as 60 months. For higher-ticket products that is not a payment method so much as a different price point.
What the shift is actually worth
Take an Egyptian store selling at 900 EGP with a product cost of 350 EGP, 70 EGP of shipping each way, a 1.5% COD collection fee, 8 EGP per confirmation attempt, and 18,000 EGP of advertising bringing in 100 orders. COD orders confirm at 70% and are delivered 80% of the time.
| Setup | Orders paid for | Profit per 100 orders |
|---|---|---|
| All COD, 80% delivered | 56 | 5,364 EGP |
| 20% of buyers pay by Fawry | 65 | 10,412 EGP |
| 35% of buyers pay by Fawry | 72 | 14,280 EGP |
Moving a fifth of your buyers onto prepaid cash roughly doubles the profit. Nothing about the product, the ads or the audience changed.
Now the line that should decide your strategy. Keep everything all-COD and imagine you achieve a perfect, impossible 100% delivery rate — every single confirmed order accepted and paid. That store earns 13,855 EGP.
Which is less than the store that simply let 35% of its customers pay at a kiosk.
Perfecting your COD operation is worth less than partly escaping it. In Egypt, and nowhere else in the region, you have that option.
So why does anyone still run all-COD in Egypt?
Mostly habit, and the fact that the apps and guides are written for markets where COD is the only choice. Two real reasons remain:
- Trust. A first-time buyer from an unknown store may genuinely not want to pay before seeing the product. COD is a trust instrument as much as a payment method.
- Friction. Walking to a kiosk is a step. Some share of buyers will not take it, and you must not force them to.
Which is why the answer is never “switch off COD”. It is: offer both, and make the prepaid option slightly more attractive. A discount of a few percent for paying up front costs far less than a return leg, and it lets the customer sort themselves into the right group.
The couriers
If your buyer still chooses the door, you need a carrier that collects well.
| Carrier | Worth knowing |
|---|---|
| Bosta | Built for ecommerce; around 80% of its revenue comes from COD, so collection is the core of the business rather than a side service. |
| Aramex | Regional reach and established COD handling across the Middle East. |
| Mylerz | Ecommerce-focused, strong in the main cities. |
| Egypt Post | The widest physical coverage, generally the cheapest, generally the slowest. |
Ask all of them the same four questions: how often do you remit, what do you charge on a failed delivery, how many attempts before it returns, and which areas do you not cover.
What an Egyptian buyer expects
- Egyptian Arabic, not Modern Standard. The written formal register reads like officialdom. Egyptian Arabic reads like a shop.
- A phone number that works. Couriers find people by calling. A wrong number is a lost order.
- The total in Egyptian pounds, before they commit — including delivery, so a COD customer knows exactly what to have ready.
- The payment choice on the page, not buried at a later step. If Fawry is only discoverable after three clicks, nobody discovers it.
Setting it up on Shopify
Shopify handles Egyptian payment methods through local gateways; what it does not do well is the COD half. The built-in cash-on-delivery option puts the buyer through a full multi-step checkout and collects an email address you will never use, when the thing you need is a reachable phone number and a single-page form.
CODPrem replaces the Buy it now button with that form: Egyptian Arabic, Arabic or English, delivery rates in Egyptian pounds, the full total shown before the buyer commits, a prepayment button with its own discount for the customers you want to move off COD, Google address autocomplete, and a confirmation-call question so the call lands when the buyer can answer.
Delivered and returned are marked from the dashboard or read back from your courier’s column in a shared Google Sheet, which is what lets you see the COD delivery rate and the prepaid share side by side — the two numbers this whole article is about.
The numbers to watch
- Prepaid share — what fraction of orders are paid before dispatch. In Egypt this is your most important single figure, and almost nobody tracks it.
- COD delivery rate — of the COD orders you ship, how many are accepted.
- Profit per delivered order, split by payment method, so you can see what the prepaid discount is really costing against what it saves.
The method is in what a COD order really earns you. If your COD half is where the losses are, the levers are in why COD customers refuse delivery.
Common questions
Is cash on delivery still worth offering in Egypt?
Yes. At roughly 45% of transactions it is still the largest single method, and removing it would cost you a large share of first-time buyers. The point is not to drop COD but to stop assuming every cash customer has to be a COD customer.
Will a prepayment discount lose me orders?
It loses some, weighted towards the buyers who would have refused anyway. Judge it on delivered orders and profit rather than orders placed — by the orders-placed measure every prepayment incentive looks like a mistake.
Which courier is best for COD in Egypt?
Bosta is the usual ecommerce default and COD is central to its business. Run a second carrier alongside for a month and compare them on delivered orders, not on price per parcel.
How is Egypt different from Morocco or Algeria?
COD is a much smaller share here and falling, and there is a real cash alternative in Fawry. In Algeria the lever is stop-desk collection; in Morocco it is the courier and the cash-flow cycle. In Egypt the lever is the payment method itself.
Where to start
Put a prepaid cash option on the form next to cash on delivery, give it a small discount, and measure what share of buyers take it. On the arithmetic above, moving one buyer in five is worth more than any delivery-rate work you could do this quarter.