An E-Commerce Platform Built for Cash on Delivery

Shifa operates 22 pharmacy branches across Amman, Irbid and Zarqa. They had launched an online store on an off-the-shelf international platform eighteen months earlier and it was losing money.

The platform assumed card payment. Cash on delivery had been bolted on as a plugin, which meant every order required manual reconciliation against courier remittance sheets. The finance team was spending two full days a week on it and still could not say reliably which orders had been paid.

Order refusal at the door was running at 23%, each refusal costing outbound shipping, return shipping and handling with no revenue against it. The checkout also demanded a street number and postcode, fields that do not map to how Jordanian addresses actually work, so customers abandoned or entered nonsense that drivers then had to resolve by phone.

This e-commerce platform Jordan sets out the brief, the approach and the measured result.

Building an e-commerce platform in Jordan means designing around cash on delivery from the first line of code, not adding it as a payment option later.

We rebuilt the storefront rather than patching it, because the payment assumption ran through every layer of the original platform.

Reconciliation as a first-class feature

Every order now carries its courier reference, remittance batch and settlement date as structured fields. Courier remittance files import directly and match automatically, with only genuine exceptions surfacing for human review.

The finance dashboard shows, at any moment, how much cash is outstanding with each courier and how long it has been outstanding — a number nobody at Shifa could produce before.

Reducing refusals

Four changes, in order of impact:

• WhatsApp confirmation before dispatch. Orders are confirmed by an automated message with a one-tap reply. Unconfirmed orders after 24 hours are held rather than shipped.
• Total including delivery shown in dinars before the customer commits, ending surprise at the door.
• Two-hour delivery windows rather than a whole day.
• Refusal history scoring. Customers with repeated refusals are asked to prepay. A small number of numbers had been generating a disproportionate share of losses.

Addressing that matches reality

The checkout captures a landmark description in free text, a map pin, and a phone number as the primary identifier. Street number and postcode are optional. Drivers navigate by landmark and phone, so the form now collects what they actually use.

Genuinely bilingual

Product names, dosage information and checkout flow were written in Arabic rather than translated, with full RTL layout including order summary and validation messages. Transactional SMS and email follow the customer's chosen language.

Pharmacy-specific requirement: prescription items route to a pharmacist for review before the order can be confirmed, with the prescription image uploaded at checkout.