Tool

The order that came back — what did it actually cost you?

The short answer

A return is not "a lost order". It is an order you paid outbound delivery on, usually the return leg too, and whose stock sat outside the warehouse for a week selling to nobody. Those three add up to a number most merchants are carrying without seeing it.

This calculator asks for your numbers and assumes no rate for you. Any calculator telling you "you will save 30%" without knowing your store is guessing, and we are not going to do that.

Cash-on-delivery orders a month

Your return rate — 18% If you do not know it exactly, your courier's report does — they track it more precisely than you do.

Outbound delivery cost per order

And what do you pay on the return leg? — 100% of outbound Some couriers charge the full return leg, some half, a few nothing. Put in what actually happens to you.

Average order value This measures the working capital standing still in stock that went out and came back — not a cash loss, but still your money.

If you confirmed before dispatch — how many of those returns would you have stopped? — 40% You set this number, not us. What we measured on a single store: of every thousand confirmation messages, about half were confirmed and only two in a thousand pressed cancel — the rest went silent. So the value of confirming is not the explicit cancel, it is the silence and what you decide to do about it.

Costing you a month

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Orders coming back—

Wasted outbound delivery—

Return leg—

Annual cost—

Stock in transit, selling to nobody—

If you stopped the share you set

—

An estimate from your own numbers. Nothing here is assumed on your behalf except what you set yourself.

And what we see in the data — honestly about its size

Measured on one store, not on a market

We have 11,694 confirmation messages actually sent between May and August 2026, and 98% of them are one store. That is a large number but it is one store, so it cannot be reported as a market rate — and reporting it as one would be exactly what we spend our time removing from other people's pages.

What we can say, and it is useful: people do not cancel, they go quiet. Half the messages were confirmed and only two in a thousand pressed an explicit cancel. So the real question in your store is not "how many will cancel" — it is "what do I do about the ones who never answered".

And that decision is yours to make

A second reminder, on your timing
Anyone who did not answer the first message gets a reminder after the delay you set — an hour, four hours, a day.
And after that: cancelled automatically, or handed to you
You choose. One store prefers to cancel anyone who did not answer; another prefers to review them by hand. Both exist, and the decision is not ours.
And the order status is written back to your store
If your store is connected (Salla, Shopify, WooCommerce, Easy Orders), the status changes in your store itself, not only here.

The order-confirmation page in full · And stores in Egypt specifically · And the WhatsApp cost calculator

And you run all of it from your phoneEverything on this page is also run from the ArabyBot mobile app — replies, orders, campaigns and AI reports. Not a web dashboard only.

Turn on confirmation before dispatch

One message before you pay for delivery — and you decide what happens to whoever did not answer.

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