Did the math on what our COD returns were actually costing us. The number was embarrassing.

Been running a Shopify store for a while now and always tracked returns as a percentage. 28%. Fine, whatever, industry standard in India, nothing to panic about. Then someone asked me what that 28% actually costs in rupees and I realized I had never once sat down and added it up. Turns out the reason nobody does is that the cost doesn't show up anywhere as one number. Forward shipping is one line. Reverse pickup is another. Restocking is somewhere in ops. The ad spend you burned acquiring that customer is in your marketing budget. Nobody's adding them together. When I finally did: every failed COD delivery was costing us somewhere between Rs400 and Rs500 once I counted everything. On 300 COD orders a month at 28% RTO that's around Rs35,000-40,000 a month just quietly disappearing. The other thing I noticed was that we were sending the same prepaid incentive to every COD customer. Same amount, regardless of whether that person was a repeat buyer or a first-time order from an address we'd never shipped to before. The incentive was going to people who never needed it and not doing enough for the ones who did. Once you separate which orders are actually at risk from the ones that were always going to pay, the conversion math changes completely. Anyone else here selling COD-heavy in India or MENA? Curious what your actual per-order loss looks like when you run the full number, most people I ask have never done it.