Two phones, two callers, fifty orders each: a Saturday morning call about Pakistani COD operations
A 30-minute WhatsApp call with a Pakistani Shopify merchant who runs COD verification calls. Two phones, two callers, fifty orders each — and where StaffPing actually fits in that workflow.
This morning I had a 30-minute WhatsApp call with a Pakistani Shopify merchant. It was the first real conversation I've had with someone who runs operations on a store like the ones I think StaffPing is for. By the end of the call I understood something I hadn't fully appreciated before: StaffPing solves a small slice of a much bigger problem, and that's actually a useful thing to know.
This post is about what I learned, what StaffPing actually does for a COD-heavy Pakistani store, what it doesn't do, and how the call clarified my positioning. It's the second chapter in the public investigation I started a week ago.
The workflow
The merchant runs a Shopify store in Pakistan. COD orders, like most ecommerce in this region. He has 2 to 3 employees whose job involves confirmation calls: when a COD order comes in on Shopify, someone has to call the customer and verify the order is real before it gets fulfilled. This is standard practice in Pakistan because COD return rates are high, and shipping a package to a fake or unconfirmed customer is expensive.
Here is how those 2 to 3 employees actually work, in his exact words:
Two numbers are used and both the callers are sitting together, so they decide which customer to call and at the same time they fill the orders. So if there are 100 orders, 50 will handle X person and 50 Y person.
So two phones, two staff sitting next to each other, splitting a list of 100 orders by hand, filling in confirmation status as they go. That's the operation.
He then told me about another Pakistani business he knows of, a bigger one, that has 10 to 12 employees doing this same work full-time. Same workflow, same call-and-confirm model, just at a much larger scale. So in this region, an entire team can be dedicated to nothing but COD verification calls. That's a real cost center for any high-volume Pakistani Shopify store.
Where StaffPing fits in this workflow
I walked him through where StaffPing fits in a workflow like his, and he agreed the fit made sense. The pitch is straightforward. When an order comes in on Shopify, a staff member receives a WhatsApp message with the order details: customer name, address, phone number, payment status, order total. Because the phone number is included in the WhatsApp message, the staff member can tap on it directly and call the customer. If the number is on WhatsApp, the call goes through WhatsApp itself.
That is the entirety of what StaffPing does for a workflow like his.
It saves one step. Maybe two. Instead of:
- Open Shopify admin
- Download or copy the order list
- Find the customer's phone number
- Copy the number
- Open phone or WhatsApp
- Paste and call
The flow becomes:
- See the WhatsApp message
- Tap the phone number
- Call
That's a real improvement. Repeated across 50 to 100 calls a day per staff member, those saved seconds add up. But it's a small slice of the workflow, not the workflow itself.
What StaffPing does not do
The honest list. StaffPing does not assign which call goes to which employee. The two callers still decide that manually as they sit together. StaffPing does not track who has been called and who hasn't, the staff still maintain that themselves. StaffPing does not record the outcome of the call, did the customer confirm, did they cancel, did they not pick up. StaffPing does not queue retries for unanswered calls. StaffPing does not deduplicate, two people could in theory call the same customer if they're not coordinating. StaffPing does not replace the spreadsheet or the manual log of confirmations.
Most of all, StaffPing does not solve the actual hard problem, which is the verification call itself and the human judgment that goes with it. The 2 to 3 employees on the call this morning are still on their phones all day. The 10 to 12 employees at the bigger Pakistani store are still on their phones all day. StaffPing makes the very first second of each call a little faster. The other 59 seconds are unchanged.
I asked the merchant if he wanted to try StaffPing. He said yes, no commitment on when. I offered a discount on top to make it easier. Still no commitment. As of this morning, he has not installed.
That is also useful data. A merchant who actively wants to solve his ops problem, who took a 30-minute call with the founder, who was offered a discount, who said yes politely, has not installed. Either the product doesn't solve enough of the problem to justify even the small effort of installing, or there's friction in the install flow I don't see, or he's busy and will get to it next week. I genuinely don't know which, and the honest answer is probably some mix of all three.
What this call clarified for me
I think I have been implicitly positioning StaffPing as something bigger than it is. Phrases like "WhatsApp staff notifications for Shopify" sound like a category, but they're vague. After this call I think the sharper positioning is this: StaffPing is a real-time awareness layer for stores where the team's actual communication channel is WhatsApp.
That's a smaller scope than "staff notifications." It's also a sharper one.
It's not a COD verification platform. It's not an order management system. It doesn't replace the spreadsheet, the call list, the OMS layer, or the human judgment about which customer to call when. It does one specific thing: it makes sure that when an order comes in, the people who need to know about it know about it immediately, in the channel they actually use, with the data they need to act on it.
For a Pakistani store with 2 to 3 callers, that means saving a few seconds per call across hundreds of calls a day. For an Egyptian store with 6 staff routing every order through WhatsApp (which is what my one paying customer does), it means real-time team awareness without anyone having to refresh Shopify admin. Different scales, same job.
The COD verification problem itself, with all its complexity around assignment, tracking, retry, outcome logging, is a much bigger product space. StaffPing is not that product. After this morning's call I'm clearer that the small slice it solves can still be real value for the right merchant, even if it's a much smaller slice than I was implicitly framing it as.
What I'm thinking about next
After the call I'm sitting with two open questions.
One: should StaffPing expand toward the verification workflow itself? Add call assignment, outcome tracking, retry queues? Or should it stay focused on the awareness layer and partner with the COD-specific tools that already exist (Xtnd, Releasit, Cartsaver and others) for the verification half? My instinct is the second. Stay narrow, do one thing well, integrate with the broader workflow rather than try to swallow it. But I haven't decided.
Two: how do I find more of these merchants? The 10 to 12 person operation the merchant mentioned is exactly the kind of business that would benefit from StaffPing. They've already invested in the people, they're already doing the calls, they would clearly value any small efficiency in the workflow. But I don't know how to find them. They're not searching the App Store. They probably don't follow Shopify ecosystem people on LinkedIn. They might not even know that "WhatsApp staff notifications" is something they can buy off the shelf.
I don't have answers to either question yet. Writing about it openly is part of how I'm trying to find them.
If you run COD operations on Shopify
If you run COD operations on a Shopify store, especially in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, or anywhere else where confirmation calls are part of the workflow, I want to hear from you.
What does your verification team look like? How many people, what's their workflow, what tools do they use? What's the most painful part of the process? Where would real-time awareness actually help, and where would it not matter at all?
Email me at zubair@staffping.net. I read every reply. I'm not selling anything in the reply. I'm trying to understand what the actual operational reality of high-volume COD Shopify stores looks like across the region, and the only way to know is to ask the people doing the work.
If you want to try StaffPing, it's on the Shopify App Store.