Solutions · reviewed 8 October 2026

RTO reduction: know which orders will come back before you ship them

Return-to-origin is the order the buyer never accepts: refused at the door, an unreachable address, a cash-on-delivery order placed on impulse. You pay the forward leg, often the return leg, and the unit is out of stock for the weeks it is in transit. The fix is not to ship fewer orders; it is to look at the risky ones before they go.

What drives RTO

• Payment mode. Cash on delivery carries most RTO; a prepaid order is rarely refused.
• Pincode. Some serviceability zones return a multiple of the average, and a seller's own history by pincode is a better predictor than any national table.
• Order value and basket. Low-value impulse orders and multi-unit orders of the same SKU behave differently from a considered purchase.
• The buyer's history with you. A repeat buyer who accepted the last three deliveries is not the same risk as a first order.

How ezmarketplaces does it

• Each order is scored for return-to-origin risk from its pincode, payment mode, value and history. The score is shown with the inputs that produced it, not as a bare number.
• A rule can hold high-risk orders for a check before they are packed: confirm by call or message, convert to prepaid, or ship anyway. A held order says why it is held and can be released by hand.
• The model is first-pass feature scoring today; a trained model replacing it is on the public roadmap, with no date attached, because that is honest.
• RTO lines in the Meesho payment report and return adjustments in Flipkart's settlement flow into the same Recovery ledger as every other deduction, so the cost of RTO is a figure, not a feeling.

What a hold rule should and should not do

A hold is a cost too: a day's delay on a genuine order. Set the threshold from your own refusal rate by pincode and payment mode, which the product shows, rather than from a rule of thumb. Start by holding only the top few percent and widen it if the confirmed-refusal rate justifies it.

Questions

Does the score use data from other sellers?

No. Your workspace's history is yours; the model never trains on another seller's data, and the inputs are listed on every score.

Can the hold be automatic?

The hold is automatic once a rule is set; the release is yours or a timer's. Nothing ships or cancels without the rule you wrote.

Which channels are scored?

Every order in the order book, whichever channel it came from. The hold rule is most used on Meesho and Flipkart cash-on-delivery orders.

Where to go next