Every online shop in Bangladesh eventually learns the same lesson: the courier you pick shapes your reviews, your cash flow, and your return rate more than almost any other decision. Yet most sellers choose courier partner options the same way — whoever a Facebook group recommended this week, or whoever quoted the lowest inside-Dhaka rate.
That approach works until it doesn’t. A courier that saves you 10 taka per parcel but fails 12% of deliveries is far more expensive than one that charges more and fails 5%. This checklist gives you nine concrete questions to ask — and how to verify the answers — before you hand over your parcels and your COD revenue.
Why you should choose a courier partner deliberately
In a COD-dominated market, your courier is effectively your payment processor. The cash your customer pays travels in a rider’s bag, through a hub, into the courier’s account, and finally to yours. Every step is a place where money can be delayed, miscounted, or disputed. Add Bangladesh’s geography — dense Dhaka neighborhoods versus upazilas reached by a single daily run — and courier performance varies enormously by destination.
A deliberate selection process costs you a week of testing. A bad courier relationship costs you months of angry customers and locked-up cash.
The 9-point checklist
1. Delivery success rate for your destinations
Ask each courier for their delivery success rate — then verify it yourself with a test batch of 20 to 30 real parcels split across your actual customer areas. National averages hide the truth: a courier can be excellent in Dhaka and weak in Rangpur. Track the batch parcel by parcel.
What good looks like: consistently above 90% for confirmed orders, with clear reasons logged for every failure.
2. COD remittance speed and transparency
How many days after delivery does collected cash reach your account? Payout cycles in the market generally range from a couple of days to a week or more — verify the current schedule directly, and get it in writing. Just as important: does the payout statement break down parcel by parcel? You need to reconcile every taka against every order. Couriers running modern software handle this automatically through a proper COD management system; couriers running on Excel will make you chase discrepancies over the phone.
3. Coverage where your customers actually live
Pull your last 100 orders and map them: how many inside Dhaka, how many in district towns, how many at upazila or village level? Then check each courier’s coverage list against that map. “Nationwide coverage” often means district towns, with village delivery handled through slower sub-networks or not at all. If a meaningful share of your orders goes rural, weight this criterion heavily.
4. Pickup reliability and cutoff times
A courier that delivers well but picks up erratically still wrecks your promise to customers. Ask: what is the daily pickup cutoff for same-day dispatch? Do they pick up from your address, or do you drop at a hub? What happens on Fridays and government holidays? Test this during your trial batch — note whether the pickup rider arrives when booked.
5. Return policy and charges
Failed deliveries are a fact of COD commerce. What matters is the cost and speed of the return leg. Ask three things: how many delivery attempts before a parcel is marked returned, what the return charge is, and how many days until returned products are back in your hands. Slow returns tie up inventory; unclear return charges quietly eat margin. Our guide on how to reduce parcel return rates covers the seller-side fixes too.
6. Tracking your customers can see
“Where is my parcel?” is the single most common message an online shop receives. If your courier offers a public tracking link with real status updates — picked up, at hub, out for delivery, delivered — you can answer that question with a link instead of a phone call. See what end-to-end parcel tracking should look like, and hold candidates to that standard. Bonus points for automatic SMS updates to the customer.
7. Merchant tools, API, and integrations
Even a small shop benefits enormously when order entry is not manual. Check whether the courier offers a merchant dashboard for bulk booking, a documented API, and webhooks for status updates. Couriers running on platforms like Drix expose a self-service merchant panel where you book parcels, print labels, track deliveries, and download payout statements without calling anyone. If you use WooCommerce or Shopify, ask specifically about plugin support.
8. Communication when things go wrong
Every courier performs well when everything is normal. The difference shows during Eid rush, monsoon flooding, or when a parcel goes missing. Ask: is there a dedicated merchant support contact, or only a general hotline? What is the claims process for a lost or damaged parcel, and what compensation applies? Get the compensation policy in writing before your first pickup.
9. Pricing structure — read past the headline rate
Delivery charges in Bangladesh typically vary by zone (inside Dhaka, suburban Dhaka, outside Dhaka) and weight, with a COD collection fee usually charged as a small percentage of the collected amount. Rates change frequently, so verify current rates directly with each courier. When you compare, build the full cost per parcel: base charge plus COD fee plus expected return cost weighted by return rate. The cheapest headline rate frequently loses this calculation.
Scoring the checklist
Not all nine points weigh equally for every shop. A simple scoring approach:
| Criterion | Weight for Dhaka-focused shop | Weight for nationwide shop |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery success rate | High | High |
| COD payout speed | High | High |
| Coverage | Low | High |
| Pickup reliability | High | Medium |
| Returns handling | Medium | High |
| Tracking | Medium | Medium |
| Merchant tools / API | Medium | Medium |
| Support and claims | Medium | Medium |
| Full-cost pricing | Medium | Medium |
Score each candidate 1 to 5 per criterion during your trial batch, multiply by weight, and the decision usually makes itself. Most established shops end up with two partners — a metro specialist and a national network — as we describe in our guide to the best couriers for F-commerce sellers.
Re-evaluate every quarter
Choosing a courier partner is not a one-time decision. Courier performance drifts: networks expand, hubs get congested, payout cycles slip. Keep tracking your three core numbers — success rate, days to deliver, days to payout — monthly, and rerun a comparison batch each quarter. The sellers who do this negotiate from data and switch before a decline becomes a crisis.
A note on the courier’s software
One question quietly predicts most of the others: what system does the courier run on? A courier managing thousands of daily parcels on spreadsheets cannot give you reliable tracking, parcel-level COD statements, or fast dispute resolution — the data simply is not there. A courier running on a purpose-built platform like Drix can, because every scan, every collection, and every payout is recorded and visible to you as a merchant in real time.
So ask the question directly. If your courier uses Drix, you get live tracking links, automatic status updates, and payout transparency down to the individual parcel. And if you have reached the scale where running your own delivery team makes sense, Drix runs that too — from rider management to COD reconciliation. Book a free demo or explore pricing to see how it works.
