There is no card form anywhere on our site. You place an order, someone calls you, and you pay the courier in cash when the box arrives. This note is about why, and about what that decision costs us — because writing about it as though it were purely customer-friendly would be leaving out half the story.

The context

Cash on delivery is normal in Egypt. It is not a fallback for people without cards or a concession to the nervous — it is how a great deal of online buying works, and offering it is closer to meeting an expectation than to making a gesture.

That said, plenty of businesses here do take prepayment. So this is a choice, not an inevitability.

Why it fits what we are asking

We are asking something fairly large of an early customer: wait while we build a device, in a production run that has not started, from a company you have not bought from before, with no shop to walk into if something goes wrong.

Asking that person to also pay in advance is a lot of trust to request in one go. Paying when the box is physically in their hands moves the risk from them to us. Given which of us knows more about whether the device will arrive, that is where the risk belongs.

It also keeps us honest in a way that is hard to fake. A company that has already taken your money has a weaker incentive to keep you informed than one that gets paid only on delivery.

What it costs

Being straight about this:

  • Failed deliveries are expensive. With prepayment, a customer who changes their mind has already paid. With cash on delivery, a refusal at the door means we have built a unit, paid a courier both ways, and collected nothing. This is the single largest cost of the model and it is not small.
  • Cash arrives slowly. Money reaches us after delivery and after the courier settles, which for a team funding its own production means a longer gap between spending on components and being paid for them.
  • Every order needs a phone call. Not automated, not a text — an actual conversation to confirm the address and that the person still wants it. At our current volume that is affordable. It will not stay affordable forever.
  • No payment data means no payment safety net. There is no chargeback process, no processor holding a record, no automatic proof of what was agreed. Disputes are resolved by talking, which works while we are small and both parties are reasonable.
  • It limits where we can sell. Cash on delivery does not travel. Selling outside Egypt means solving payment properly first.

The call is not overhead

It looks like a cost and it is partly a feature.

The call catches addresses that would have failed, people who ordered twice by accident, and misunderstandings about what the device is — all before anything is built. A caught misunderstanding at that point costs a phone call. The same misunderstanding caught at the door costs a device, two courier journeys and an unhappy person.

It is also the only point where someone can ask us a question and get an answer from a person who actually built the thing. We would not want to lose that even once volume makes it hard to keep.

What we do not collect

No card numbers, no billing addresses, no payment tokens. Not because we are unusually principled about it, but because there is nothing to collect: the transaction happens at the door, in cash, and we are not part of it beyond sending the courier.

The practical consequence is that we hold your name, phone number and delivery address, and nothing that would be interesting to steal. For a small company without a security team, not holding sensitive data is a more reliable protection than promising to guard it well.

What changes later

This will not scale indefinitely. Higher volume means failed deliveries become a serious line item, the calls become impossible by hand, and selling beyond Egypt requires real payment infrastructure.

When that happens we expect to add prepayment as an option rather than a requirement. What we would like to keep is the part that is actually load-bearing: nobody pays for a device before it exists, and somebody speaks to you before we build it.