What "confirmation" means in cash on delivery
When a customer pays online with a card, the money arrives before you ship. The order is already real. Cash on delivery works the other way round: the customer types a name and a phone number, clicks Order, and pays nothing. You then pay to pack and ship the parcel, and only find out whether the sale exists when the delivery agent knocks on the door.
Confirmation closes that gap. Before the parcel goes anywhere, someone β a human on the phone, or an automated WhatsApp message β asks the customer a simple question: do you still want this order, at this address, for this price? Only orders that come back "yes" get packed and shipped. Everything else is cancelled, corrected, or retried.
In eGrow this is a pipeline stage. A new order lands in a stage such as New, and confirming it moves it to Confirmed, which is what makes it eligible for the next step in your workflow β packing, then shipping.
Why confirming is not optional
Every unconfirmed order you ship is a bet. These are the costs you carry when the bet loses:
- You pay for failed deliveries. Carriers charge for the attempt and often for the return leg too. A refused parcel can cost you the full round trip and earn nothing.
- Wrong and fake numbers. A typo in a phone number is invisible until a delivery agent cannot reach anyone. Confirmation catches it while the order is still on your screen.
- Duplicates. Customers double-submit forms all the time. Two parcels, one customer, one payment.
- Buyer's remorse. Ordering costs nothing, so people order impulsively and change their mind within hours. Better to learn that before you pack.
- Address and product corrections. Most confirmation calls are not yes or no β they are "yes, but send the blue one" or "yes, but deliver to my office". Catching that before shipping turns a return into a sale.
- Your carrier relationship. Carriers watch your return rate. A high one costs you leverage on pricing, and with some carriers, your account.
The four ways to confirm in eGrow
| Method | Best for | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmation Center β agents call each order | Steady daily volume, a team, orders worth a phone call | One call per order |
| By hand β change the stage in the order | A single order, a correction, a customer who already replied elsewhere | A few clicks |
| Bulk update β many orders from the list | Clearing a backlog, orders already confirmed another way | A few clicks for any number of orders |
| WhatsApp automation β buttons the customer taps | High volume, cutting call costs, confirming outside working hours | Set up once, then none |
They are not exclusive. The most effective setup uses the automation first and the Confirmation Center for whoever does not reply.
Method 1 β The Confirmation Center
The Confirmation Center at v2.egrow.com/centers/confirmation turns your new orders into a call queue. An agent opens the next order, calls the customer with built-in VoIP so the call and its result are logged automatically, checks the details, and records the outcome β Confirmed, Cancelled, No answer, Busy, and so on.
What makes it more than a to-do list is the mapping: you decide, once, which pipeline stage each outcome moves the order to, which outcomes get retried, how many times, and how long to wait between attempts. So "No answer" can automatically re-queue the customer three times over two days, then drop the order into a failure stage instead of leaving it to rot in the queue.
Configure it at Settings → Centers → Confirmation.
Method 2 β Confirming one order by hand
Sometimes you do not need a queue. The customer already replied to you on Instagram, or you fixed an address and just want the order to move on.
- Open the order from your orders list.
- Find the Pipeline section in the order details.
- Change the stage to Confirmed (or whichever stage your workflow uses for confirmed orders).
The order moves immediately and leaves the confirmation queue. This is also how you undo a mistake β move an order back to New if it was confirmed in error.
Method 3 β Confirming many orders at once
When you already know a batch of orders is good β you confirmed them on a call sheet, or they came from a repeat customer list β you do not have to open them one by one.
- Open your orders list.
- Tick the checkbox next to each order you want to confirm. Use the checkbox in the table header to select the whole page at once.
- A three-dots menu appears at the top right of the orders table as soon as something is selected.
- Click it and choose Update status.
- Pick Confirmed and apply. Every selected order moves at once.
Method 4 β Automatic confirmation over WhatsApp
Instead of calling, you send the customer a WhatsApp message with two buttons β Confirm and Cancel β and let their tap update the order. Customers answer in seconds, at any hour, and your agents only handle the ones who do not reply.
This takes two automations working as a pair. Build them at v2.egrow.com/automations.
Automation A β ask the customer
- Trigger: eGrow → Order Created (or Order Stage Updated if you only want to ask at a certain stage).
- Condition: only continue when the order is in your new-orders stage, so you never message the same customer twice.
- Action: WhatsApp → Send Message (With Template), using an approved template that carries two quick-reply buttons: Confirm and Cancel. Pass the order number and the total into the template so the customer knows exactly what they are agreeing to.
Automation B β act on the answer
- Trigger: eGrow → New Message Received.
- Condition: the message text matches your button label β Confirm. A quick-reply tap arrives as plain text equal to the button's own label, so the condition is a simple text match. Add a second branch for Cancel.
- Action: eGrow → Update Order Stage → Confirmed. Point the Cancel branch at your cancelled stage.
1. Button labels must match your condition exactly β including capitalisation and spacing. If you rename a button in the template, update the condition the same day or confirmations stop landing.
2. Templates need Meta approval before they send, and the buttons are part of the template, so plan a day for review.
3. Avoid emoji inside button labels. Meta rejects some of them, and they make the text you have to match unreliable.
What happens next: send confirmed orders to your carrier automatically
Confirmation is not the end of the flow β it is the trigger for the next one. Once an order reaches Confirmed, eGrow can hand it to your shipping company on its own, so nobody re-types an address into a carrier dashboard.
- Connect your shipping company from Integrations. eGrow supports the main carriers directly, and any other one through a Custom Webhook.
- Build one automation: trigger eGrow → Order Stage Updated, a condition that the stage is Confirmed, and the action your carrier provides β usually Add Parcel.
- From then on, every order your team or your WhatsApp buttons confirm is sent to the carrier within seconds, and the tracking number comes back onto the order.
This is also the reason the warnings above matter: once this automation exists, confirming an order β by hand, in bulk, or by a customer tapping a button β is shipping it.
Which should you use?
- Just starting, low volume. Confirm by hand. Do not build automation for ten orders a day.
- A team and steady volume. Use the Confirmation Center and spend your time on the retry rules β that is where the recovered orders are.
- High volume, or calls are costing too much. Run the WhatsApp automation first and let the Confirmation Center pick up only the non-responders. Most stores land here eventually: the automation clears the easy majority, and your agents spend calls where a human actually changes the outcome.
Common mistakes
- No failure stage. Without one, orders nobody could reach sit in the queue forever and your agents keep re-reading them. Give up deliberately after a set number of retries.
- Confirming before checking stock. Confirming an item you cannot ship turns one disappointed customer into two calls.
- Shipping unconfirmed orders when the queue backs up. This is exactly when return rates spike. If you cannot confirm fast enough, that is an argument for the WhatsApp automation, not for skipping the step.
- Treating a no-answer as a cancellation. Most customers simply miss the first call. Retries recover a real share of them.