An online shop for your grocery or café, paid cash on delivery

Our article on opening an online shop from your till shows how customers order: they open your link, fill a cart and send the order with their address. This one is about what happens next, when the order is paid in cash, at the door. For a grocery or a café in the UAE that is still the most common way to pay, and it is where small shops lose money without noticing.

Before the first order: the rules

• Delivery areas. List the areas your driver actually reaches in reasonable time, each with a delivery fee and a minimum order. Five well-chosen areas beat twenty.
• Pickup. If you do not deliver, or not everywhere, let customers order ahead and collect.
• Opening hours for orders, and what customers see outside them.
• Who watches the orders. One named person per shift. An order nobody accepts for twenty minutes is worse than no online shop.

When an order arrives

1. The order appears on the online orders page and the till, with the customer's name, phone, area, address and note.
2. Someone accepts it, or calls the customer if something is unclear or out of stock.
3. The order waits on the till as a held order while it is packed.
4. It is marked out for delivery when the driver leaves.
5. The driver collects the cash. The order is marked delivered and the sale is completed at the till, in cash, like a counter sale.

Doing step 5 at the till, not on paper, is what keeps stock, receipts, VAT and the drawer right.

Change and the driver's float

Give each driver a small float in change at the start of the shift and record it. Customers pay with AED 100 and 200 notes; a driver without change waits, or rounds in the customer's favour, or in his.

Settling the driver at the end of the shift

At the end of each shift, settle every driver: the orders he delivered, the cash he should have, the float he took, what he hands over. Count it in front of him. A difference is recorded against that driver and that shift. This is the step most shops skip, and the one that matters.

Refused and returned orders

Sometimes the customer is not home, or refuses the order. Mark it returned, put the goods back in stock (or record the waste for chilled items), and do not complete a sale. Customers who refuse orders twice can be asked to pay at pickup next time.

Keep the prices honest

Online prices should be the till's prices. If you add a delivery fee, show it before the customer sends the order. Do not raise prices online without saying so; customers compare with the receipt.

What to measure

Weekly: online orders, their average value, the share delivered vs collected, refused orders, and drivers' cash differences. If refused orders grow, call customers to confirm before packing.

In CreekPOS

The online shop comes with the Restaurant and Chain plans of CreekPOS Online and is a monthly add-on on Retail. Customers pay cash on delivery or when they collect; online card payment is not available yet. Set delivery areas with fees and minimums, pickup and hours in Settings → Online; and manage orders on POS → Online orders, from new to accepted, out for delivery and delivered. If you use the delivery desk for your own drivers, Driver settlement under POS settles each driver's cash at the end of the shift. See the online shop page and the manual.