If you've ever signed up with a freight aggregator in India, you know the drill: before you ship anything, you have to recharge a wallet. Sometimes ₹5,000. Sometimes ₹50,000. The amount sits there, earning nothing, while you ship orders that mostly pay in COD anyway.
We hated that. So we built COD net-off, the way it should have worked from day one.
The problem with wallets
The aggregator's logic is simple: they don't want to chase you for freight payments after the fact. So they front-load it. You pay first, then ship.
The problems compound:
- Cash trapped in transit. If your AOV is ₹800 and you ship 200 orders/day, a ₹40,000 wallet is just one week of float — gone.
- Surprise low-balance halts. You wake up Monday to find Saturday's pickups didn't go out because the wallet hit zero on Sunday.
- Reconciliation hell. Wallet top-ups, freight debits, weight-discrepancy adjustments, refunds — all in one number, with no clean ledger.
How COD net-off actually works
With Skyfleet, you never pre-fund. Here's the flow for a typical COD order worth ₹999 with ₹65 of freight:
- You ship the order. We bill ₹65 to your account — no wallet debit.
- Courier delivers. Customer pays ₹999 in cash to the rider.
- Courier remits ₹999 to us (T+3 to T+8 depending on courier).
- We net-off ₹65 freight and remit ₹934 to your bank account.
No wallet. No top-up. No locked cash. The math happens at remittance time, not at shipping time.
What this changes for an Indian D2C brand
Suddenly your working capital isn't sitting in someone else's wallet. It's in your inventory, your ads, your team. For a brand shipping 5,000 orders/month with ₹70 ACPI, that's ₹3.5L of float back in your business — every month.
The other underrated win: cleaner books. Your CA gets a clear monthly freight invoice and a remittance statement. No reconciling a wallet against debits across 14 couriers.
The catch (and how we manage it)
The honest part: we're extending you credit. So we have to underwrite you a little. New accounts start with a soft cap (₹50k of unsettled freight) that grows as we see your COD remittance pattern. After 30 days of clean ops, most brands are effectively uncapped.
We also won't do COD net-off for accounts that ship <90% COD — the math doesn't work. Those accounts pay weekly on invoice instead.
“We moved from a competitor's ₹2L wallet model to Skyfleet's net-off in October. That ₹2L went straight into a Diwali Meta budget and the ROAS paid for itself in week one.” — Founder, Mumbai-based home goods brand
Bottom line
Pre-funded wallets exist for the aggregator's convenience, not yours. If you're a COD-heavy seller doing ₹10L+ GMV/month, COD net-off isn't a nice-to-have. It's a working capital strategy.
