How to set a minimum or maximum order value for Cash on Delivery in Shopify

Updated July 5, 2026 · ACOD (E-TRADE PARTNER)

Shopify can't natively limit Cash on Delivery by order value — the manual COD payment method is all-or-nothing. To offer COD only between, say, ₹300 and ₹5,000, you need a Shopify Functions payment customization that hides COD when the cart total is outside your range. ACOD does this with two conditions (minimum and maximum) that you can use separately or together, and combine with location, product, and customer-tag rules.

Why stores cap COD by order value

• A maximum caps your risk. A refused ₹8,000 COD parcel costs you both return shipping and weeks of locked-up inventory. Most COD-heavy stores set a ceiling above which prepayment is required — it's the single most effective RTO control that doesn't add friction for normal orders.
• A minimum protects your margins. On a ₹250 order, courier cash-collection charges can eat the entire profit. A floor keeps COD for orders that can absorb the handling cost.
• Couriers often force limits anyway. Many cash-collection services have their own per-parcel COD caps — mirroring them at checkout prevents orders you can't actually ship.

What Shopify gives you natively

Nothing for this, as of 2026. The manual Cash on Delivery method is either active for everyone or inactive for everyone. Order-value conditions require a payment customization built on Shopify Functions — native checkout technology, available on all plans, but you need an app (or a custom-built function) to configure it.

Setup with ACOD (about 5 minutes)

1. Install ACOD and open the COD availability rules.
2. Add a minimum order value condition, a maximum, or both — e.g. minimum 300, maximum 5,000 in your store currency.
3. Optionally stack more conditions: only certain countries or postal-code ranges, exclude specific products or collections, block customers tagged after refused deliveries, or limit by total order weight.
4. Turn on testing mode and place a test checkout (email test@example.com) at a value inside the range, then outside it — COD should appear and disappear accordingly.
5. Switch testing mode off. The rules now run natively inside checkout for every customer.

Customers outside the range simply don't see Cash on Delivery at the payment step — they can still pay with any prepaid method. There's no error message to translate and no blocked checkout; the option just isn't offered.

Choosing the numbers

Set the maximum at the value where a refused parcel starts genuinely hurting: a common approach is 2–3× your average order value, or your courier's cash-collection cap, whichever is lower. Set the minimum just above the point where the courier's COD handling charge exceeds your margin on the order. Then revisit both quarterly against your actual refusal data — if refusals cluster above a certain value, lower the ceiling; if small orders rarely refuse, you may not need a floor at all. Pairing the cap with a COD fee that's waived for prepaid orders pushes borderline customers toward prepayment instead of just blocking them.

Frequently asked questions