How fastrr Checkout Reduced RTO by 80.8% for a Leading D2C Beauty Brand

About the Brand

A leading D2C beauty and personal care brand with 50 lakh+ customers serves shoppers across India through an extensive fulfillment network spanning 19,000+ pincodes.

With a large customer base and significant order volumes, Cash on Delivery (COD) remained an important part of its checkout experience. But as order volumes grew, so did the operational impact of failed deliveries.

For the brand, controlling Return to Origin (RTO) was therefore not simply a logistics objective. Every returned order could result in additional shipping costs, blocked inventory, and pressure on margins.

The brand needed a way to manage RTO risk before an order entered fulfillment—without eliminating COD for customers who genuinely preferred it.

What Was “The Challenge”?

At its peak in June 2026, the brand recorded an RTO rate of 28.62%.

In other words, almost 1 in every 3 orders was being returned.

Three factors were contributing to the challenge:

• High COD dependence: COD remained a preferred payment method for a significant portion of customers, increasing exposure to delivery rejection and RTO.
• Order-level risk: Not every customer or order carries the same probability of RTO, making blanket COD restrictions ineffective.
• Address quality: Incomplete or potentially inaccurate delivery information could make successful fulfillment more difficult.

At this scale, the brand needed a more intelligent approach: identify risk, intervene selectively, and encourage safer payment behavior.

How Did fastrr Help Reduce RTO?

fastrr Checkout implemented a multi-layered risk-and-reward approach, addressing RTO at several points in the checkout journey.

How can brands identify high-risk COD orders?

Instead of disabling COD for everyone, fastrr enabled high-risk COD blocking using AI-powered RTO prediction.

The system evaluates customer and order-level signals to identify potentially high-risk orders. For orders with a higher probability of RTO, COD can be dynamically disabled, encouraging customers to choose prepaid payment instead.

This allowed the brand to move from a blanket COD strategy to risk-based COD decisioning.

How can brands reduce RTO while still offering COD?

Removing COD altogether can create friction for genuine COD shoppers.

fastrr introduced Partial COD as a middle ground. Customers could continue to pay a portion of the order online while paying the remaining amount at delivery.

This approach helped balance customer payment preference with order commitment, giving the brand an additional tool to manage COD-related RTO risk.

How can prepaid incentives reduce COD dependency?

fastrr also addressed RTO proactively by encouraging customers to choose prepaid.

The brand offered a 5% prepaid discount, capped at ₹125, giving customers an immediate financial incentive to pay upfront.

The checkout experience was further supported through integrations with Nector iCash and Gyftrr Gift Vouchers, providing customers with additional ways to use loyalty benefits and vouchers for prepaid purchases.

How can identity verification help prevent risky orders?

fastrr enabled Truecaller and otpLess Login, providing customers with faster authentication while strengthening the identity layer of the checkout experience.

One-tap verification reduced unnecessary login friction while ensuring that the phone number associated with the order was verified through the authentication process.

How can brands improve address quality to reduce RTO?

Payment risk is only part of the problem. An incorrect or incomplete address can also lead to failed deliveries.

fastrr’s Address Intelligence and Address Scoring helped evaluate delivery information and identify potentially doubtful addresses.

This enabled the brand to add another layer of risk assessment before orders moved into fulfillment.

What Was the Impact?

The combined approach delivered a significant reduction in RTO.

Metric	Peak RTO Period – June 2026	Current Performance – September 2026	Impact
RTO Rate	28.62%	5.47%	80.8% reduction
Order Volume	3,27,651	1,79,678*	Continued high-volume operations
Prepaid Discount	₹125 cap	₹125 cap	Consistent incentive
Address Scoring	Enabled	Enabled	Continuous risk assessment

*September represents mid-month performance.

The RTO rate fell from 28.62% to 5.47%, a reduction of 23.15 percentage points and 80.8% relative reduction.

Put simply, the brand moved from almost 1 in 3 orders being returned to fewer than 1 in 18 orders.

Importantly, the reduction came while the brand continued to operate at significant scale, with 3,27,651 orders during the June peak period and 1,79,678 orders already processed by mid-September.

What Can eCommerce Brands Learn from This?

RTO prevention doesn’t have to mean eliminating COD.

A more effective approach can be to identify risk at the checkout level and apply the right intervention to the right order.

For the brand, fastrr combined:

AI-powered RTO prediction → Smart COD controls → Partial COD → Prepaid incentives → Identity verification → Address intelligence

The result was a shift from reactive RTO management to proactive risk management at checkout.

By bringing risk assessment and payment optimization directly into the purchase journey, fastrr Checkout helped a leading D2C beauty brand reduce RTO by 80.8%, from 28.62% to 5.47%, while continuing to operate at high order volumes.

Because the best way to manage RTO is to stop risky orders from becoming RTO orders in the first place.