How to read your COD logs in ten minutes a week
Four things to check every Monday. Each takes about two minutes and each one catches a class of problem before it turns up in your RTO rate a fortnight later.
The CODGuard team
Product
Logs are the earliest signal you have. RTO tells you what went wrong two weeks ago; the logs tell you what is going wrong right now. Ten minutes on a Monday is enough if you know what you are looking for.
1. OTP send-to-verify ratio
Divide OTPs verified by OTPs sent. A healthy store sits high; a sudden drop almost never means your customers changed.
Look for a delivery problem — a template issue, a credential problem, or a messaging outage. It can also mean a bot is hitting the endpoint, which the rate limiter will show as a cluster of blocked sends from a small number of numbers.
Trigger to act: a fall of more than ten points week-on-week.
2. Failed verifications by pincode
Sort failures by postal code. Repeated failures from one area usually mean one of three things: poor mobile coverage, a cluster of the same bad actor, or a genuine delivery-hostile zone that is about to show up in your RTO numbers.
Trigger to act: any pincode contributing disproportionately to failures across twenty-five or more attempts.
3. The unverified-checkout trend
Shoppers who opened the modal and never completed. A slow rise here is the most reliable early warning you have — it means something in the flow has become harder. A modal change, a theme update, a new device pattern, or copy that has stopped making sense.
Trigger to act: three consecutive weeks of increase.
4. Message delivery status
Not "sent" — delivered. Messages that leave your system but never arrive cost you exactly the same and buy you nothing. Because every message stores the rate it was billed at, you can also see precisely what a delivery problem is costing you while it runs.
Trigger to act: any sustained gap between sent and delivered.
Why weekly, not monthly
Each of these leads your RTO rate by roughly the length of a shipping cycle. Caught on Monday, a broken template costs you a week of misdirected messages. Caught at month-end, it costs you a month of returns you have already paid to ship — and by then the cause is buried under three weeks of unrelated data.
Put this into practice
CODGuard does the verification, scoring and rules described here. It installs free from the Shopify App Store — no theme code, no monthly fee to start.