Why Moroccan customers don't choose prepaid payment in e-commerce
The title could also be "why Moroccan customers choose COD", but learning more and more about the market makes us realise that there's much more beneath the surface. Let's dive a little deeper into why prepaid seems not to be a preferred method, and it's not just for customers.
Coming from digitally mature markets, when you want to buy something, adding your credit card, choosing direct debit, or using another instant payment method available in your market seems to be the norm. You don't even think about the option of paying on delivery, especially because you know you won't be home to even tap your card.
In Morocco, it is still the norm. It's not perfect. But it works. As researchers of this market, not just observers, we went a little deeper to understand this behaviour. Big numbers say COD, but no one is counting the failed attempts to pay by card. And it doesn't stop here. Let's break this down in two parts.
The friction stack
1. The card that cannot pay online
Morocco has over 21 million bank cards in circulation. That number hides more than it reveals: the overwhelming majority of card activity is cash withdrawal at an ATM, not payment. A large share of those cards were issued as cash-access instruments and were never enabled for online transactions at all.
This is the least understood constraint in the market, including by cardholders themselves. A customer who selects cash on delivery may not be expressing a preference. They may be holding a card that would fail at your checkout, without knowing it, without knowing why, and without knowing that fixing it is a phone call or an app toggle away, depending on their bank.
When a merchant reads that customer as "resistant to online payment", the diagnosis is wrong and every remedy built on it fails. You cannot educate someone into using a capability their card does not have.
2. Cash on delivery is consumer protection, not habit
Look at what COD actually gives the customer: the right to see the product before any money leaves their hands. In a market with no widespread buyer-protection scheme, where a refund, if it comes at all, arrives slowly and after effort, that inspection right is not a quaint tradition. It is the only enforcement mechanism the customer has.
Cash at the door is doing the job that escrow, chargebacks and money-back guarantees do in mature e-commerce markets. Nobody built that protection layer here yet, so customers built it themselves, out of banknotes.
Once you see it this way, prepayment stops looking like the obvious modern choice and starts looking like what it actually is from the customer's side: a transfer of all transaction risk from the merchant to the buyer, with nothing offered in return. Which brings us to the third layer.
3. "Nothing in it" for them
Ask the honest question: what does your customer gain by prepaying? The order does not arrive faster. It does not cost less. It carries no additional guarantee. Prepaying means surrendering the inspection right, taking on refund risk, and doing extra work at checkout, in exchange for making the merchant's operations smoother.
Rational people do not pay to absorb someone else's risk. The absence of any incentive is not a detail; it is a complete explanation on its own. Even a customer with an enabled card, comfortable with technology and inclined to trust you, has no reason to switch. The remarkable thing is not that prepayment rates are low. It is that anyone prepays at all.
4. The checkout that punishes the willing
Now take the rare customer who has an enabled card, trusts your brand and decides to prepay anyway. They still have to survive the transaction: the 3-D Secure redirect, the OTP that arrives late or not at all, the session that times out while they retype the code, the opaque failure message at the end.
One failed attempt does not cost you one transaction. It confirms every suspicion the customer walked in with, and it sends them back to cash, often permanently. The customers you lose at this layer are precisely the ones the first three layers had already filtered in your favour. There is no more expensive place in the funnel to fail.
What the merchant can actually move
Read as a stack, the picture looks bleak: bank-issued constraints, a missing national protection layer, a structural incentive gap. Most of it sits far above any single merchant's reach, and the players with the balance sheets to shift national behaviour, platforms, banks, the state, move on their own timelines.
But "most of it" is not "all of it". Each layer has a merchant-sized lever.
Against the enablement gap: guided activation. If a meaningful share of your COD orders come from customers whose cards simply are not enabled, then helping them enable those cards is not a cost, it is a service moment. Each bank has its own path, and walking a customer through their specific one, over WhatsApp, at the moment they are motivated to complete a purchase, converts a structural constraint into a relationship. The customer you help activate does not just prepay this order. They can prepay everywhere, and they remember who made that possible.
Against the protection gap: trust substitution. Cash at the door protects the customer; so publish something that does the same job. A refund promise that is specific, visible and short: what qualifies, how fast the money comes back, through which channel. Not legal boilerplate on a policy page, but a commitment stated where the payment decision is made. You are not asking the customer to give up their protection. You are replacing it with yours, and the replacement has to be legible before it is asked to carry weight.
Against the incentive gap: the deposit as bridge. Full prepayment asks the customer to surrender everything at once. A partial deposit does something smarter: it preserves their inspect-before-paying hedge while eliminating the casual refusal, the order placed on impulse and abandoned without cost when the courier calls. The customer keeps most of their protection; you eliminate most of your worst losses. In this market, the deposit will outperform any push for full prepayment, because it works with the customer's logic instead of against it.
Against checkout friction: failure recovery. Treat a failed payment as a lead, not an endpoint. A pay-by-link retry, sent minutes after the failure with a human line attached, recovers a customer who has already decided to pay you. Without it, one late OTP undoes everything the other three levers built.
What to expect
None of this flips a customer base to prepaid. What these levers do, applied together and measured properly, is move card and deposit share from near zero into a realistic 15 to 30 per cent in favourable segments, with the true ceiling discovered per merchant rather than promised upfront. At Moroccan COD economics, where every refused parcel carries double freight and every confirmation call carries payroll, that band is transformative on its own.
In our view, work starts with knowing your numbers: what share of your refusals are casual, what share of your COD customers hold activatable cards, and where exactly your checkout loses the willing. That is a diagnostic exercise, and it is where the methodology behind this article begins.
One thing worth knowing before you start: each Moroccan bank has its own path to enabling online payment, and we can help you with that.
Sorato Digital works with Moroccan merchants on payment activation, COD operations and refusal-rate reduction. If you want to know your real prepayment ceiling, start with the readiness assessment.
