Okay, we’ve heard your story and we empathize. Will you pay for drinks online and before delivery though? 
It does not matter the way you spin it, x tending to zero can never be less than zero. The z overhead will always exist. According to the calculations, the only way non-POD will ever be better that POD is when DHL starts paying the seller to deliver his goods - meaning z is tending towards a negative value. When that happens I will be posting a million items to myself on a daily basis and use my gains to be Linda Ikeji’s neighbour…
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Dude - all I’m saying is that z may already be a sunk cost so there’s no reality whereby x+y+z is not equivalent to x+y
Furthermore, DHL doesn’t need to pay the seller to deliver her goods. They’ve already charged the seller for the return leg (if any). That’s why they don’t charge extra to bring it back. If that’s the case, you’ve already eaten z
Btw @tola and @techscorpion
You guys are both falling over the obvious. Howbeit more colorfully. POD is a lot of sweat to scale as opposed to PBD. POD as an attempt by one of the big 2 e-commerce site to out do the other, is not really e-commerce and I mean it literally.
OP, I think a more interesting, worth engaging discourse would be, when exactly the big 2 will call off this mutually disadvantageous offering or perhaps they have cracked the POB model into a sustainable place in Africa’s e-commerce offering?
Hypothesizing, let’s think of all sellables online as edibles. Imagine if all we shopped for online were immediate consumables - dramatically speaking cooked food.
Which sellers would risk, rather, which e-commerce site would onboard sellers willing to POD their ‘wares’?
It becomes none negotiable, how a seller would bill in this case. One must pay before delivery. Unimaginable, otherwise.
In this case, buyers will have to get smart with their purchase while using any portal. To boot, people have ended up buying knock offs thinking they were originals at shops they walked to with their own 2 legs. Goods they scrutinized with their own 2 eyes. They weren’t so traumatized afterwards taht they never step inside a shop again. No.
If Jumia & Konga had left that need to ill innovate and had rather looked towards stricter controls and measures internally to reduce discrepancies btw what people saw online and what they got sent. Meaning a mutual no POD policy, online shoppers would have long gotten accustomed to paying before delivery.
It naturally to measure ones position against status quo and status quo aka Amazon - in this case - don’t do POD.
The truth is no one would have asked for POD. I wager so.
A lot of psychological servicing goes into these things, check Amazon pricing science and you’d start to understand.
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So you bring me 6 crates of Malta Guinness for my kid’s birthday when I only requested for Maltina. Then start telling me super story.
Point is, until I have assurances that legitimate return implies money refunds in hours or minutes, forget it. Especially because money is not to be joked with here. I don’t have my item, I don’t have my money either. What is that?
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I agree that an escrow service is the best thing for trust issues. Pay on Delivery might fool you into thinking you have more customers than you actually do.
From a customer’s POV - sometimes people order the same item on Jumia and Konga saying “whoever delivers first”. If they see a better/easier deal outside before the Jumia/Konga orders come, they can pick that up and not pick either. It’s terrible for the cost structures of Jumia or Konga.
Removing POD allows you to know who’s serious - people who are willing to actually remove money from their wallet for your product. An escrow service protects them from fraud and the risk is shared. With POD, the risk is only on your side. IMHO, that’s not good business.
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In business expecting 100% successful transactions is unrealistic. Of course there will be returns. Of course customers will go awol. That’s the cost of doing business. Time for you to price it into your product or shut up shop.
I totlally disagree with this statement
I’ve run an online store for a year+ now (turning it into a market place ala Jumia and friends) and I’m now just integrating online payments and thus PBD. Did that because very very few Ugandans have cards and those that do have trust issues (Hey Drake 
) so no way anyone was going to pay before they see their item. (We have a saying here, a Ugandan’s eyes are in their hands) and we’ve bled a lot of money in that time cause of returns. We don’t charge for delivery within the CBD so you can imagine. But in that year, what we’ve built is trust. Atleast now, we have a sustainable number of regular clients who pay before delivery using Mobile Money so it makes sense to now implement and enforce it on everyone else. Should be done by the end of this month.
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If I had a dollar for every time someone said something like this, I’d be rich asf and those ideas still wouldn’t be implemented.
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Get ready to lose your dollar buddy. It’s already in the works.
More importantly, would you or any of your fellow comment likers use it?
Here is an interesting article I recently read about Flipkart’s Cash on Delivery problems in India.
Will CoD kill the Indian e-commerce star?
Some worthy quotes.
For Flipkart too, 72 percent of orders from metros are CoD, and 90 percent for Tier II cities.
Online sellers struggle the most due to CoD. Suraj Vazirani, an Ahmedabad-based online seller, says that since marketplaces do not give an option to the seller to choose only prepaid orders, they have to deal with CoD returns– about 20 percent on average.
China’s booming e-commerce is ruled by Alibaba’s payment wallet Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Payment.
CoD declined in China when mobile wallets started offering interests. “If Paytm gives seven-percent interest, it’s a saving account and the user will want to use that to shop…"
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POD drives me crazy (not the drug sha). I have complained so much to Konga I am tired of complaining.
First of all it does not help the sellers.
You spend your time to package an item and ship it, only for you to be told that it was returned because POD! Now you have to spend your fuel and car to go pick up that item. Now imagine that item is a N1000 book which is what I sell typically on my konga store. Why will I spend money to pick up a POD returned book that costs N1000? Its much cheaper for me to leave it with Konga.
Secondly, Konga POD system is inflexible. There was a time a buyer history showed he had rejected about 3-4 POD orders, but yet they wanted me to honor his order. And when I refused I was penalized =/
Lastly POD reinforces a stifling habit to e-commerce growth. Which says that the Nigerian internet can’t be trusted, this instead of focusing on campaigns on the benefits of paying online, POD system reinforces the myth. And why? Because of a false short term bump in sales from POD which is not sustainable.
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I totally Agree with you.
POD has to die a natural death,
once the Big guys say No more POD, that ends POD in a huge way.
When people see they have to pay for an item, you can guage their interest in said items, plus with their money in your hand, you have no objections but to fulfill that order no matter what, which keeps you on your toes.
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I think POD (Payment on Delivery) is a payment model not business model, or what do we think?
Hallelujah brova!!! Preach!
You seem knowledgeable. I’m currently working on a facebook Ad and had seriously contemplated PBD because I feel their is much overhead costs and risks with POD. But then, I would love us to chat privately, maybe on fb.
My Username: Okoli Gabriel Chudy
Add me up on facebook Sir. I feel we may need to talk better.
I think pay on delivery is working for you in the context of your business. You are one of the 30,000 merchants on Konga so you don’t run the website yourself. You are only driving traffic to your profile.
Conversely, as a Konga or Jumia, it is a different ball game. While the odds might favourite you in the context of your business. At the large scale, these companies are burning cash with no profit in view at least in the next three years.
Even with a compelling case for POD, checks needs to be put in place. For instance, why not have a minimum deposit for POD that can be forfeited for canceled orders. This is not cast in stone and perfect, but you cannot be burning cash for nothing.