Moroccan COD glossary: the words of the trade

The vocabulary of cash-on-delivery selling in Morocco, defined term by term, with the French, Arabic and Darija spellings actually in use.

The essentials

What is it?: A list of short definitions covering the vocabulary of Moroccan COD: the words of selling, confirmation, logistics, money and tooling. Each entry gives a self-contained definition and the other spellings of the same term.
Who is it for?: Sellers starting out who meet a word they do not know, agents and packers who need to use the same vocabulary as the rest of the chain, and developers connecting a store who have to map their fields onto ours.
How does it work?: Each term is given in its commonest form, followed by the variants it is met under — French, English, Arabic, Darija in Arabic script, Darija in Latin letters — and then a definition of one to three sentences.
What is it for?: Because the trade is spoken in three languages at once, and the same thing is written 'commande', 'kommanda', 'كومند' or 'order' depending on who is writing. A vocabulary misunderstanding between a seller and an agent costs a parcel.
How do you use it?: Search the page for your word, or read the list through: it follows the life of an order rather than the alphabet. For a full explanation of a subject, the site's other pages each cover their own — pricing, delivery, returns, confirmation.

This glossary defines the terms used in cash-on-delivery selling in Morocco — from lead to withdrawal — giving for each the French, English, Arabic and Darija spellings under which it actually circulates.

Why one word is spelt five ways

Moroccan e-commerce is spoken in Darija, written in French, coded in English and typed in Arabic or Latin letters depending on which keyboard is to hand. The same object therefore carries several names at once, and none of them is the correct one: an agent says 'kommanda' on the phone, the seller writes 'commande' in a spreadsheet, the API returns a field called 'order', and the customer gets a message in Arabic about a 'طلبية'.

This page lists those spellings instead of correcting them. Each entry therefore carries its real variants, including the Latin-letter forms nobody would put in a formal document but everybody types in a message. That is what lets you recognise a term when you meet it in an unexpected shape.

How to read an entry

Each entry starts with the term in its commonest form, then gives the other spellings, then the definition. The definitions are written to be read alone: none points to another entry, and none assumes you have read the one before.

The order of the list follows the life of an order — the sale, the call, the parcel, the money, the tooling — rather than the alphabet. A reader going through it from start to finish learns the chain along with the words.

COD (cash on delivery): A way of selling in which the customer pays nothing when ordering and settles the amount in cash with the courier at the moment the parcel is handed over. It is the majority payment method for online selling in Morocco, because it requires the buyer to have neither a bank card nor prior trust in the seller.
Lead: An intention to buy that has not yet been confirmed: a form filled in, a direct message, a row imported from a spreadsheet. A lead is not a sale — it has cost advertising budget and will only earn anything if it becomes a delivered order.
Order: A lead confirmed by phone: the item, the quantity, the total price and the address have been checked with the customer, and the customer has said yes. From that point a parcel is created and fees are incurred.
Confirmation: A phone call made to the customer before dispatch to check the item, the quantity, the total price quoted with delivery included, the exact address and whether the person will be available. It is the step that decides whether everything after it is profitable, because a parcel sent without confirmation comes back far more often.
Confirmation agent: The person who calls customers to confirm orders. While the call lasts, the lead is locked to that agent so another one does not ring the same customer. A seller may also ask to confirm their own leads, in which case no confirmation fee applies.
Upsell: An item or a quantity added to an order during the confirmation call, raising the value of the sale without raising the cost of the delivery. An upsell changes the amount to be collected, so that new total must be repeated and explicitly accepted by the customer before the call ends.
Unreachable customer: A customer whom neither the confirmation team nor the courier can reach: a number that does not answer, rings out, or is simply wrong. It is one of the two return reasons for which fees are configured separately, the other being refusal after the product has been presented.
Damaged lead: A lead that arrived incomplete or malformed: a phone number with the wrong number of digits, an unreadable city, a product matching no catalogue line. It is set aside in its own list to be corrected rather than lost, because a lead paid for in advertising and thrown away over a typo is an avoidable loss.
Parcel: Goods packed and labelled, declared with the carrier under the customer's name, phone, city, address and the amount to be collected. A packed product without a carrier label exists in a warehouse but not in the delivery network.
Hub: The place where products are stored, picked, packed and labelled before being handed to the carrier. The hub operator sells nothing and calls nobody: they physically prepare parcels from confirmed orders.
Carrier: The company that takes charge of parcels, moves them to the destination city, has them delivered and collects the amount due. Not to be confused with the courier, who is the person handing the parcel to the customer. On CODFamilia the integrated carrier is OzonExpress.
Delivery note: The document listing the parcels handed to the carrier at a collection, signed at handover. It establishes what actually left the warehouse: when a parcel goes missing, it is the only thing that shows where the chain broke.
Delivery city: A city a parcel can be delivered to, with a delivery fee of its own. A city must exist in the carrier's reference list before a parcel can be created for it; the delivery cities page gives the current list, currently 65 cities.
City alias: Another spelling of the same city, tied to its official name so that an order is not rejected over how it was written. 'Casa' for Casablanca, 'كازا', 'Dar Bida': a customer writes what they say, and the alias stops a parcel being created for a city the carrier does not recognise.
Delivery rate: The share of dispatched orders that are actually delivered and paid for by the customer. It is the metric that decides whether a shop makes money: an undelivered parcel loses the delivery fee, the return fee and the advertising spent on the lead, with no revenue at all.
Return: A parcel that comes back into stock without having been delivered, because the customer refused it, was not there, or could not be reached. The product is not lost, since it goes back into stock, but the delivery and the return have been paid for nothing.
Delivery fee: The amount due to the carrier for moving a parcel, set city by city. It is due on dispatch whether or not the parcel is delivered — one of the two fees a seller pays even when the sale fails.
Confirmation fee: The amount charged for confirming an order by phone — 10,00 MAD per order on CODFamilia, charged once however many calls it takes to reach the customer. A seller allowed to confirm their own leads does not pay it.
Return fee: The amount due when a parcel comes back undelivered. Two cases are configured separately, because they do not cost the carrier the same: the customer saw the product and refused it, or the customer could not be reached.
Catalogue: The set of products a seller can sell without buying them: the goods are held, packed and shipped by the platform. The public CODFamilia catalogue holds 1 products, each with its price for the seller and its available stock. A private product, by contrast, is assigned to one seller and does not appear in it.
Sourcing: A request to the team to find and stock a product that is not in the catalogue, because a seller has spotted a trend before it exists there. Sourcing takes time: the goods have to arrive physically in Morocco before they can be sold on cash on delivery.
Selling price: The total amount the seller quotes the customer, delivery included, and which the courier will collect. It is entirely free: the platform imposes no resale price and takes nothing extra if the seller sells higher. It is the only margin lever a seller without stock has.
Margin (profit): What the seller keeps on a delivered order. The calculation contains no percentage: total paid by the customer, less the product price, less the confirmation fee, less the delivery fee. A margin worked out without the return fees of failed orders is a false margin.
Wallet: The internal account where an order's profit is posted the moment it is marked delivered. The wallet therefore shows what has been earned, before the carrier has remitted the matching cash, and it is where withdrawal requests start from.
Withdrawal: The request by which a seller has their wallet balance paid out, above a minimum amount. The payment comes with a supporting document, and it is made to the bank account whose RIB the seller has registered.
Advance against profit: A sum paid to a seller against the profit of orders already dispatched but not yet delivered, capped as a percentage of those profits and then deducted from future profits. It is an anticipation rather than a loan, and it does not remove the risk of an order coming back.
RIB: The full identifier of a bank account in Morocco, needed to receive a transfer. A seller registers it in their settings so that withdrawals are paid into the right account; a wrong RIB is the most ordinary cause of a payment that never arrives.
Webhook: An address the platform calls automatically when an event happens, to tell another system without that system having to ask. It is the mechanism that lets a custom store send its orders in, or receive a status change without polling the platform in a loop.
API: The interface through which an outside program reads and writes platform data — creating an order, reading a status, looking up a product — authenticating with a key. It is the integration route for a store with no ready-made connection, such as a Shopify store or a custom-built site.
Dropshipping: Selling a product you have neither bought nor stored: the goods are held and shipped by a third party. In Morocco, dropshipping works with cash on delivery only if the goods are already in the country, because a customer who has waited weeks refuses the parcel on arrival at no cost to themselves.
Winning product: A product whose sales comfortably cover the advertising, the fees and the returns. The phrase is useful but misleading: a product is not winning in itself, it is winning for a given offer, price, audience and delivery rate, and it stops being so when several sellers promote it to the same audience.
ROAS (ad spend): The ratio between what an advert earns and what it costs. In COD it can be worked out two very different ways: on orders received, which flatters the figure, or on orders actually delivered and paid for, which is the only useful calculation. Advertising is not charged by the platform and remains the seller's own spend.

Frequently asked questions about COD vocabulary

What is the difference between a lead and an order?

A lead is an unverified intention to buy; an order is a lead that has been confirmed by phone, with the item, quantity, total price and address validated by the customer. As long as it is only a lead, all it has done is cost advertising.

Why is the same word spelt differently by different people?

Because the trade is spoken in Darija, written in French and coded in English, on an Arabic or Latin keyboard depending on the moment. 'Commande', 'kommanda', 'كومند' and 'order' mean exactly the same thing. That is why every entry in this glossary lists the spellings actually in use.

Are the carrier and the courier the same thing?

No. The carrier is the company that takes charge of parcels, moves them and collects the cash; the courier is the person who travels and hands the parcel to the customer. A problem with a round is settled with the carrier, not with one particular courier.

What is a city alias for?

To get an order accepted when its city is written differently from the carrier's reference list. A customer writes 'Casa' or 'كازا'; the alias ties that spelling to the official city so that a parcel is not created for a destination nobody recognises.

What is a delivery note, and who signs it?

It is the document listing the parcels handed to the carrier at a collection, signed at handover. It establishes what actually left the warehouse, and it is the only usable record when a parcel goes missing between the hub and the courier.

Margin, profit, earnings: which is the right word?

They are used interchangeably in the trade. What matters is the calculation: total paid by the customer, less the product price, less the confirmation fee, less the delivery fee, with no percentage anywhere. A margin quoted without accounting for returned orders is always overstated.

What does "damaged lead" mean?

It is a lead that arrived malformed: an incomplete phone number, an unreadable city, a product that cannot be found. It goes into its own list to be corrected rather than thrown away, because that lead has already cost its advertising budget and a typo is no reason to lose it.

Also worth reading

Words exist so that parcels are not lost

A seller, a confirmation agent and a packer using the same vocabulary lose fewer orders than a team that guesses. That is the whole point of this page.