What the approve rate really measures in Thailand COD

Cash on delivery means nobody pays anything at the moment the form is submitted. The buyer types a name, a phone number and an address, and everything that decides whether you get paid happens afterwards, offline, in Thai.

Each stage removes volume. Understanding which stage is leaking tells you whether the problem is your creative, your lander, your targeting or the offer itself.

• Lead submitted — the form arrives in the system and is deduplicated.
• Call-center contact — a native Thai operator calls, usually within business hours of the submission.
• Confirmation — the buyer confirms the product, quantity, price and address. This is the moment the lead becomes an approved order.
• Shipment and delivery — the parcel goes out through a local courier.
• Cash collected — the buyer pays the courier and the order is settled.

The approve rate an affiliate is paid on is measured at the confirmation stage: confirmed orders divided by valid leads delivered. It is not the delivery rate and not the collection rate — those sit with the advertiser and the fulfilment side.

Our published network average is 47.8% on quality traffic across the catalog. Treat it as a planning baseline, not a promise: a well-targeted men's health campaign on native traffic and an aggressive broad-interest push campaign will not land in the same place.

Almost every approve-rate conversation comes back to the same three variables.

• Intent. A buyer who read a price, a delivery promise and a product description before submitting confirms far more often than one who clicked a shock headline and filled a form to see what happens.
• Phone-number validity. Thai mobile numbers are ten digits starting with 06, 08 or 09. A form that accepts anything will happily collect numbers nobody can call.
• Time to first call. Interest decays fast. Leads generated late at night and called the next afternoon confirm noticeably worse than leads called while the page is still in the buyer's mind.

Do not start by asking for a payout bump. Work the funnel from the bottom up, because a fix at the lander is cheaper than a fix at the offer.

• Show the price and the COD terms on the lander, before the form. Surprise at the call is the single most common refusal reason.
• Ask for the minimum fields: name, phone, address. Every extra field trades volume for nothing.
• Validate the phone format client-side and reject obvious placeholders.
• Match the creative promise to the product on the confirmation call — an operator cannot confirm something the ad implied but the product does not do.
• Check your hour-of-day split. If a slot produces cheap leads that never confirm, it is not cheap.

Cost per approved order is your true acquisition cost. If a payout is $22 and your approve rate is 47.8%, every raw lead is worth about $10.52 to you, and any lead cost above that is a loss no matter how good the CPL looks in the ad platform.

Set your platform target on the approved-order value, feed approved events back into the source where the integration allows it, and let the algorithm learn on the event that actually pays.