NDR Statistics India 2026: Failed Deliveries, Reattempts & Costs

TL;DR: NDR statistics India 2026

India's National Consumer Helpline logged 79,818 complaints about undelivered products in 2025, more than any other ecommerce grievance, according to the government's reply to Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 4041. Five years earlier, the same category stood at 28,496. Those are only the shoppers who filed. The larger cost sits inside seller operations, where each failed attempt moves a parcel closer to return to origin (RTO).

This roundup of NDR statistics for India leans on audited IPO filings and government records, with ClickPost's own 2025 and 2026 shipment data used where no public source exists. An NDR (non-delivery report) is the status a courier raises when a delivery attempt fails. An RTO happens when the NDR stays unresolved and the parcel travels back to the seller.

What is NDR in ecommerce, and how often do Indian deliveries fail?

About 18% of Meesho's shipped orders failed to reach buyers between April and September 2025, based on delivery success rates disclosed in its IPO filing. COD orders failed at 24.15% and prepaid orders at 3.61%, weighted here by Meesho's 72% COD share. Undelivered parcels like these are what an unresolved NDR turns into.

What does NDR stand for?

NDR stands for non-delivery report. In Indian ecommerce, the courier raises an NDR when an attempt fails and logs a reason code against it. The NDR rate is the share of shipments that record at least one failed attempt, whether the parcel is later delivered or returned.

How long before an NDR becomes an RTO?

Delhivery's NDR documentation sets out the most common rule in Indian courier networks:

1. The first attempt fails and the courier raises an NDR with a reason code.

2. The seller or buyer can request a reattempt, with corrected details if needed.

3. A forward shipment gets up to three delivery attempts.

4. If the third attempt also fails, the shipment status moves from out for delivery to RTO.

Supporting delivery failure data:

• 97% of RTOs on ClickPost's network begin as an NDR, according to ClickPost's FY2026 network data published in its 90-Day RTO Reduction Playbook.

• Up to 20% of business-to-consumer deliveries fail on the first attempt worldwide, according to a 2023 peer-reviewed study in Production and Operations Management.

• Meesho counts an order as successful once it reaches the buyer, even if it is later returned, so its 18% figure reflects parcels that were never delivered.

• Meesho's filing describes its base as largely value-conscious, including first-time ecommerce users from Tier 2+ cities, so a metro-heavy D2C brand would typically see lower failure rates.

Many published benchmarks mix NDR rate and RTO rate. The Meesho figures sit at the RTO end of that path, because they count parcels that never got delivered at all.

What do NDR statistics show by city tier and payment mode in 2026?

Tier 3 D2C orders returned as RTO at 12.0% in October and November 2025, almost double the 6.6% metro rate, according to ClickPost's peak-season analysis of 35.8 million orders. Payment mode widens the gap further: COD orders fail several times as often as prepaid ones.

RTO rate by city tier: metro vs Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3

Source: ClickPost analysis of 35.8 million D2C orders, 1 October to 30 November 2025. Multiples calculated by the editorial team.

• Tier 2 and smaller cities handled about 62% of India's ecommerce shipments and about 55% of ecommerce GMV in FY2025, according to Redseer's January 2026 logistics report.

• Three in five new online shoppers since 2020 come from Tier 3 or smaller cities, per Bain's How India Shops Online 2025.

ClickPost's FY2026 network data, published in its 90-Day RTO Reduction Playbook, puts Tier 3 RTO at 23.73% and metro RTO at 10.92%. The two datasets use different samples and time windows, so their absolute rates differ. Both still show Tier 3 RTO at about twice the metro rate.

Order volume keeps moving toward the pin codes where parcels fail most often, so blended RTO can rise even when operations stay the same.

COD vs prepaid: the split that changes everything

Meesho's IPO filing is the largest audited public dataset on this split. The marketplace recorded 1.83 billion placed orders in FY2025, and its filing reports delivery success separately for COD and prepaid orders.

Source: Meesho Limited RHP (27 November 2025), via its notice to investors. Undelivered rows calculated as 100% minus the disclosed success rate.

• COD fell from 47.00% of Shadowfax's total orders in FY2023 to 34.46% in April to September 2025, according to its red herring prospectus. The base includes hyperlocal food and quick commerce orders.

• Over the same period, the share of Shadowfax's COD order value collected by UPI at the doorstep rose from 16.6% to 25.8%.

• COD orders returned as RTO at 37.51% against 5.28% for prepaid in ClickPost's FY2026 network data, a 7.1x gap that sits close to the 6.7x undelivered-rate gap in Meesho's filing.

• Prepaid orders made up 52% of festive D2C shipments in the opening window of the 2026 sales, up from 46% a year earlier, across a fixed cohort of 200 brands in ClickPost's data, as BW Businessworld reported.

Doorstep UPI matters for NDR because it removes one failure reason outright. A buyer who lacks exact change can still pay.

NDR rate by product category: what published data shows

No independent study publishes NDR rates by product category for India. ClickPost's FY2026 network data gives directional RTO ranges for COD orders.

Source: ClickPost FY2026 network data, brands with 1,000+ COD shipments, published in its 90-Day RTO Reduction Playbook.

• Low-value categories led by fashion and beauty and personal care made up about 85% of India's ecommerce shipments in FY2025, according to Redseer. Fashion also carries the highest return volumes of any category.

Category matters mostly through order value and payment mode. A high-ticket prepaid order and a low-ticket COD order in the same category carry very different risk.

Why do deliveries fail in India? Failed delivery statistics by cause

Address quality sits behind a large share of failures, since 20% to 30% of written pin codes in India are incorrect, according to a 2018 MIT Media Lab and Delhivery paper. The same research puts the national cost of poor addresses at $10 billion to $14 billion a year, about 0.5% of GDP.

• About 80% of Indian addresses are written relative to a landmark that typically sits 50 to 1,500 metres from the actual door, per the MIT Media Lab paper.

• Only about 30% of Indian addresses follow a structured street format, the same paper found.

• In a Delhivery sample of 500,000 captured locations, only half carried GPS accuracy within 50 metres.

• Just 25% of customers in a Delhivery pilot pinned their home within 100 metres of the location later captured by ground staff.

These figures date from 2018, yet Redseer's 2026 report still names unstructured addresses and wrong pin codes as a cause of misrouted shipments.

Root causes of RTO, by share

Source: ClickPost analysis of 50M+ monthly shipments across 450+ brands, published in its 90-Day RTO Reduction Playbook. Each RTO is assigned to the first cause that failed.

COD refusal and address errors together account for roughly half of all RTOs in that analysis. Both are fixable before dispatch.

What Indian shoppers complain about most

Source: Department of Consumer Affairs, reply to Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 4041, 12 August 2026. Changes calculated by the editorial team.

Non-delivery grew more than four times as fast as total complaints in 2025. Its share of all ecommerce complaints rose from 10.8% in 2024 to 15.6%.

Carrier-side failures vs customer-side failures

Customer-side failures need re-engagement, while carrier-side failures need dispute evidence. One shared queue slows both.

How many reattempts do Indian couriers make, and what improves the odds?

Delhivery allows up to three delivery attempts on a forward shipment before it moves to RTO, according to its published NDR process. Research on last-mile routing shows the order of stops on a route also shapes the outcome, cutting failed attempts by about 10% in a field experiment.

• A routing algorithm that predicted failure risk reduced the share of failed delivery attempts by 10% and total delivery cost by $13 per route, in a randomised field trial published in Production and Operations Management (2023).

• The same study found packages placed later in a route failed less often, which the authors linked to higher driver effort toward the end of a shift.

• Doorstep UPI now covers about a quarter of Shadowfax's COD order value, which gives buyers without exact change another way to pay on reattempt.

Channel-level reattempt rates, such as WhatsApp versus IVR, circulate widely in vendor content, but none we found traced to a published methodology. They are left out of this article until a primary study exists.

What percentage of NDRs become RTOs?

48% of NDRs ended as RTO across ClickPost's network in FY2026, according to network data published in its 90-Day RTO Reduction Playbook. The ratio climbs with every failed attempt, and top-quartile brands keep it under 25%.

Source: ClickPost FY2026 network data, 90-Day RTO Reduction Playbook.

The jump between the first and second NDR is the steepest step. Once a parcel fails twice, recovery odds fall to roughly even.

What does a failed delivery cost an Indian seller? RTO cost statistics

₹545 crore worth of goods came back as RTO across 35.8 million D2C orders in October and November 2025, according to ClickPost's peak-season analysis. That works out to about ₹152 of merchandise reversed for every order shipped, before counting freight paid in both directions.

Last-mile delivery can sometimes account for almost half of the delivery cost of an Indian ecommerce shipment, according to Redseer. An RTO pays for that leg and then pays again for the return.

Line-item cost model per failed order

No audited, India-wide cost per RTO exists, so the closest benchmark is a published cost model. ₹350 is the typical loaded cost of one RTO on a ₹1,200 order in ClickPost's model, with a range of ₹285 to ₹490 depending on the order.

Source: ClickPost loaded-cost model for a typical ₹1,200 order, published in its 90-Day RTO Reduction Playbook.

On a ₹100 crore GMV business at that order value, each percentage point of RTO equals about 8,333 return events a year, or ₹29.2 lakh in margin.

Seasonal volatility: festive-period NDR pressure

Shoppers placed about 8 to 9 crore orders in the first two days of the 2026 festive sales, while GMV ran at about six times the usual daily rate, according to Redseer estimates reported by Business Standard. About two-thirds of the 6 to 6.5 crore shoppers came from Tier 2 cities and rural areas.

"First-time shoppers doubled from last year," said Nikhil Dalal, associate partner at Redseer Strategy Consultants. Meesho's filing ties its COD reliance to exactly this group of first-time users from Tier 2+ cities, so festive peaks load NDR risk into the hardest pin codes at once.

First orders returned as RTO at about 29% on ClickPost's network, falling to about 22% by a customer's sixth to tenth order, per its playbook data. That gap is why a doubling of first-time festive shoppers matters for NDR load.

How common are fake delivery attempts in India?

No independent, audited rate exists for fake delivery attempts in India. Online estimates vary widely and come from vendors using different methods, so this article does not publish one. The firmest floor is government data, with 79,818 non-delivery complaints filed at the National Consumer Helpline in 2025.

A fake attempt is an NDR logged without a genuine visit or call, usually under the customer-not-available code. Operations teams that look for them tend to rely on a few signals:

• The GPS position at the failure scan sits far from the delivery pin.

• Failure timestamps fall outside the buyer's stated availability window.

• No call log or message exists before the NDR was raised.

• One delivery executive or route shows an NDR cluster well above the hub average.

Which operational levers reduce NDR? A six-point checklist

1. Address validation at checkout. With 20% to 30% of written pin codes wrong, catching errors while the buyer is still on the page is the cheapest fix available.

2. NDR outreach after the first failed attempt. NDR-to-RTO conversion rises from 20.2% after one failed attempt to 45.5% after two, so the first reattempt carries the best recovery odds.

3. Separate queues by reason code. Customer-side cases go to re-engagement, and carrier-side cases go to dispute review.

4. Pre-dispatch COD confirmation. COD orders on Meesho went undelivered at 6.7 times the prepaid rate, so screening them before dispatch removes the riskiest parcels.

5. Monthly courier scorecards by pin code. Tier 3 RTO at 1.8 times the metro rate shows why national averages hide where allocation should shift.

6. Peak-season capacity planning. Festive GMV ran at about six times the usual daily rate in the 2026 opening sale, so capacity gets sized ahead of the sale window.

NDR forecast: how many shipments will India handle by 2030?

India's ecommerce logistics network handled 4.9 billion to 5.3 billion shipments in FY2025 and is projected to reach 15 billion to 16 billion by FY2030, a 23% to 27% CAGR, according to Redseer. Those totals include RTO parcels, so failed deliveries grow with the market unless rates fall.

Sources: Redseer India 3PL Market report (January 2026) and Redseer's H1 2026 online retail analysis via IBEF (October 2026). Forward-looking figures are projections.

The 2026 figures come from Redseer's latest online retail analysis. Both sets are projections from a single research firm, so some caution is fair. Even the low end implies roughly three times today's parcel count by 2030.

Four NDR trends shaping Indian ecommerce in 2026

Non-delivery complaints are climbing fastest

68% more non-delivery complaints reached the National Consumer Helpline in 2025 than in 2024. In the same reply, the government noted a new voluntary Bureau of Indian Standards code, IS 19598:2026, which covers delivery and returns among its e-commerce principles.

COD is shrinking, slowly

72.00% of Meesho's shipped orders were COD in April to September 2025, down from 88.71% in FY2023. Shadowfax's COD share fell from 47.00% to 34.46% over the same span, so the shift shows up across marketplaces and carriers.

Smaller cities carry the volume

62% of ecommerce shipments already go to Tier 2 and smaller cities, per Redseer. Those cities also show the highest RTO in ClickPost's tier data, which pushes NDR workload toward the hardest pin codes.

Digital addresses arrive with DIGIPIN

4m x 4m is the grid size of DIGIPIN, the geocoded address system the Department of Posts launched in May 2025 with IIT Hyderabad and ISRO's NRSC, as The Week explained. Each grid gets a 10-character code, though shopper adoption at checkout remains the open question.

Master table: 10 NDR statistics for India in 2026

Frequently asked questions about NDR statistics in India

What is NDR in ecommerce India?

18% of Meesho's shipped orders failed to reach buyers in April to September 2025, and each failed attempt along the way generated an NDR. NDR stands for non-delivery report, the status a courier raises when it cannot hand over a parcel. An unresolved NDR sends the shipment back to the seller as RTO.

What is a good NDR rate for D2C brands in India?

6.6% is the festive RTO rate metro D2C orders recorded in ClickPost's October to November 2025 data, against 12.0% in Tier 3 cities. India has no audited NDR benchmark, so the useful comparison is a brand's own rate by city tier and payment mode, measured against those published ranges.

What are the most common reasons for failed delivery in India?

20% to 30% of written pin codes in India are wrong, per MIT Media Lab research, which makes address errors a leading NDR driver. Customer unavailability and COD refusal are the other common reason codes. A smaller share of NDRs are carrier-side, logged without a genuine delivery visit.

How long does a courier take to reattempt after NDR?

3 delivery attempts is the limit Delhivery applies to a forward shipment before it moves to RTO, according to its NDR documentation. The reattempt runs after the seller or buyer responds to the NDR, so the first few hours after a failed attempt decide how much of that limit gets used well.

What is the difference between NDR and RTO?

Up to 3 delivery attempts, under Delhivery's rule, separate the two events. An NDR records a failed attempt while the parcel is still recoverable in the courier network. An RTO begins once attempts run out and the parcel heads back, so the sale is lost and freight is paid twice.

What percentage of NDRs become RTOs in India?

48% of NDRs ended as RTO across ClickPost's network in FY2026, rising from 20.2% after a first failed attempt to 88.5% after three or more. Top-quartile brands keep the ratio under 25%. No independent national ratio is published, and the 30% to 40% figure repeated online traces to no primary study.

How much does an RTO cost a seller in India?

₹350 is the typical loaded cost of one RTO on a ₹1,200 order in ClickPost's cost model, within a range of ₹285 to ₹490. Shipping in both directions accounts for ₹110 to ₹180 of that. Each percentage point of RTO on a ₹100 crore GMV business is worth about ₹29.2 lakh a year.

What is NDR resolution rate, and how can brands improve it?

6.7 times is how much more often COD orders failed than prepaid ones on Meesho, which shows where resolution effort pays off most. NDR resolution rate is the share of NDRs delivered on reattempt before they turn into RTO. Fast contact and separate workflows by reason code tend to lift it.

Conclusion

About one in four COD orders on India's largest marketplace never reached the buyer in 2025, against one in 28 prepaid orders. Tier 3 D2C orders returned at almost twice the metro rate, and non-delivery complaints to the government rose 68% in a year. Read together, these numbers make NDR a margin and repeat-purchase problem before they make it a courier problem.

The trend lines point in two directions. COD is shrinking and digital addressing is arriving, yet volume keeps shifting toward the pin codes where parcels fail most. At about ₹350 per RTO on a ₹1,200 order, each percentage point of RTO costs a ₹100 crore GMV business roughly ₹29.2 lakh a year.