How to hide Cash on Delivery in Shopify (5 approaches compared)

Approach 1: Don’t activate COD in the first place

What it is

In Shopify admin: Settings → Payments → Manual payment methods. Either don’t add Cash on Delivery, or remove it. This is the simplest possible answer.

When it works

If your COD volume is so small (say, <5% of orders) that the gross revenue lost from disabling it is less than the RTO losses you’re absorbing, just turn it off entirely. Most US/EU stores fit this profile.

When it doesn’t work

In COD-heavy markets, this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You’d lose 40–80% of your topline. Not viable.

Approach 2: Manual per-order toggling

What it is

Keep COD activated for everyone, but manually intervene on suspect orders — cancel-and-refund the bad ones, or call the customer to confirm before fulfilling. No code required.

When it works

Very low order volume (say, <100 orders/day where you can eyeball every COD order before fulfillment) and you have time for outbound calls. Some merchants build a customer service team around this.

When it doesn’t work

It doesn’t scale. Once you’re past ~50 COD orders/day, the labor cost of manual review eats more than the RTO losses you’re preventing. And the failed-to-confirm calls still cost you something — you ate the freight to attempt the call.

Also: you’ve already shipped the order in many cases by the time you realize it looks suspect. The right place to stop these is before the customer hits “Complete order,” not after.

Approach 3: Shopify Scripts (deprecated June 30, 2026)

What it is

If you’re on Shopify Plus, you used to be able to write a Ruby Script in the Script Editor that hides COD based on cart total, customer tag, country, or other conditions. Example:

if Input.cart.subtotal_price >= Money.new(cents: 50000)
  Input.payment_gateways.delete_if { |gw| gw.name == "Cash on Delivery" }
end

That hides COD for any cart over $500.

When it works

It doesn’t, anymore. Shopify disabled editing of Scripts on April 15, 2026, and is shutting off execution entirely on June 30, 2026. Any Script you have today silently stops firing after that date. If you’re still relying on Scripts for COD gating, you have a migration deadline.

We covered the migration in detail in Migrating from Shopify Scripts to Functions. The short version: pick a Functions-native replacement and import your existing Scripts.

Approach 4: Build a custom Shopify Function

What it is

The official replacement for Scripts is Shopify Functions. You write a small WebAssembly program (Rust or JavaScript), deploy it through the Shopify CLI, and it runs at checkout to hide payment methods based on whatever logic you want.

When it works

If you have engineering resources and your COD-hiding logic is genuinely unusual — pulling data from an external risk-scoring API, combining 8+ signals in a weighted score, or running against a proprietary blacklist — a custom Function gives you total flexibility.

When it doesn’t work

Most merchants underestimate the lift. A from-scratch Function involves:

• Learning Rust or the Shopify Functions JS runtime
• Setting up the Shopify CLI, partner app, and Function deployment pipeline
• Writing GraphQL metafield schemas for your rule configuration
• Building an admin UI so non-engineers can edit the rules (otherwise every change is a code deploy)
• Ongoing maintenance as Shopify Functions APIs evolve

Realistic timeline: 1–2 weeks of dev work, plus ongoing maintenance. Worth it if you’re a large enterprise with a Shopify engineering team. Not worth it for the 95% of merchants whose COD logic falls into a handful of well-understood patterns.

Approach 5: A payment customization app (PayLogic and others)

What it is

An app installed from the Shopify App Store that runs as a Function on your behalf and exposes a visual rule-builder so you can configure the COD gating without writing code.

There are several apps in this space. They differ on architecture (older ones use the carrier-service-callback hack, newer ones are Functions-native), feature coverage, and pricing. The honest picks worth evaluating are the Functions-native ones with Built-for-Shopify status — PayLogic is one, and a couple of others exist.

When it works

This is the right answer for nearly every Shopify merchant who’s gating COD as a business rule. You get:

• Rules configured in minutes, by anyone on the team — no engineering required
• Cover for the common patterns (cart total, country, customer tag, first-time customer, item count) out of the box
• A migration path off Scripts if you’re still on them
• With some apps (including PayLogic): gating COD by Shopify’s own order risk model. This is the move that Scripts could never do — hiding COD specifically from customers Shopify has previously flagged HIGH or MEDIUM risk on prior orders. For COD-heavy markets, this single rule typically cuts RTO 5–15 percentage points.

When it doesn’t work

If your COD gating logic genuinely requires an external API call, custom risk-scoring math, or something else outside the standard rule templates, an app won’t do it for you — you’d need a custom Function (approach 4). But this case is rarer than people assume.