Shopper RTO history
Prior return-to-origin rate for this phone number with this merchant.
Flo / In development
Every COD order is an unsecured loan
Cash on delivery converts shoppers who would otherwise abandon. It also ships inventory to people who never intended to pay for it. Flo scores that risk at checkout and adds friction only where the risk justifies it.
The problem
Blanket COD rules cost you good orders
Most teams manage return-to-origin with static rules: a cart value ceiling, a pincode blocklist, COD off for new customers. Those rules are indiscriminate. They block genuine buyers to catch a minority, and the shoppers they turn away are the ones most likely to have converted.
Risk is not a property of the cart. It is a property of the shopper, the address, the session, and the history behind them. Flo scores those together and reserves friction for the orders that warrant it.
How it scores
Nine weighted signals, one score
Behavioural signals arrive from a lightweight browser SDK. Transactional and historical signals come from the merchant order record. Scoring happens server-side, so nothing about the model is exposed to the client.
Pincode risk
Observed RTO rate for the delivery pincode.
Order velocity
COD attempts from the same device or phone in the last 48 hours.
New shopper, high cart
First-time buyer placing an unusually large COD order.
Time on site
Session duration before reaching checkout.
Address copy-paste
Pasted rather than typed address, street, city, or pincode fields.
Category risk
Per-category RTO weighting the merchant configures.
Order time
Orders placed in the overnight window score differently.
Payment hesitation
Switching between prepaid and COD before submitting.
What happens at checkout
Four outcomes, thresholds you control
Each merchant sets their own thresholds. The default posture is permissive: friction is the exception, not the rule.
Allow COD
Order proceeds with no added friction. Most orders land here.
Verify OTP
One-time password to the shopper phone before COD is confirmed.
Validate payment
A token payment that is auto-refunded, proving the payment instrument is real.
Block COD
COD is withdrawn for this order. Prepaid remains available.
Cold start
A new shopper is not a risky shopper
A risk engine with no history defaults to suspicion, and that is exactly wrong on day one. Flo caps the score upward for first-time buyers and for merchants still building order volume, so a new storefront never hard-blocks the customers it most needs to keep.
Integration
Native where it matters, API-first everywhere else
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Native cartridge. Risk evaluation runs server-to-server on signed requests from the payment hook, so no scoring logic sits in the browser.
Headless and custom checkouts
REST API for evaluation and verification, with a browser SDK under 15KB for the behavioural signals.
Mobile apps
The same API-first integration model supports mobile checkout implementations without a separate risk engine.
Status
In active development
Flo is not generally available. The core risk engine and staging API are running; challenge flows and the Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge are built while merchant-dashboard integration and end-to-end validation continue. We are evaluating design-partner fit with merchants that operate meaningful COD volume.