Here are the new designs:

Text messaging has a number of advantages over email, especially for time-sensitive communication.  Text messages are typically delivered faster than email.  They are also read sooner, since most people carry their cell phones at all times and not everyone has constant access to email.  Finally, they do not suffer from spam and thus are unlikely to get blocked, delayed, deleted, or moved to a folder where they’ll never be seen.

All this is important in reliably getting order status updates to buyers and giving sellers the tools to respond to orders as quickly as possible.  Text messaging is a great advantage to managing urgent orders reliably.  We strongly advise existing sellers to enable text messaging by logging into their account and clicking on the Mobile checkbox next to their phone number.

Text messages are sent only for urgent events.  Currently just for new orders for sellers and order confirmation/cancellation for buyers.

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Auto-Confirm allows sellers to bypass the confirmation step of the BoxCycle Order Process.  When used properly, it benefits both buyers and sellers.

Buyers get to pickup boxes quicker, sometimes much quicker, since they get the seller’s location immediately after order.  Sellers save a bit of time on order processing and get additional business since buyers often want to pickup boxes yesterday and Auto-Confirm is the only way to achieve a high level of certainty that you’ll get boxes fast.

Of course, this means the seller must always be available during their working hours and must always have boxes on hand.  There are many sellers who meet these requirements, primarily businesses who always have staff on location and always have boxes in storage.

However, despite stern warnings when selecting the option, some sellers appear to not understand the full significance of selecting Auto-Confirm.  Although we notify sellers upon Auto-Confirm orders, buyers can show up less than an hour after order placement, possibly before the seller received a notification.  It’s clearly not appropriate for casual sellers who might not be home or might forget to update their listing.

I’ve been mulling various options for managing Auto-Confirm for a while.  We’ve already added language to our Terms of Service.  We’ve also already limited casual sellers from selecting Auto-Confirm (and other advanced options), by moving them out of the initial Preferences screen.   Most casual sellers do not Show All Preferences.

However, an issue with an Auto-Confirm order last night made me refocus on the problem.  Unfortunately, it does not seem that sellers can be trusted with properly using a dangerous option like this, warnings and all.  So, we’ve added a requirement of an authorization step.  Before authorizing the seller for Auto-Confirm we’ll make sure their situation is appropriate and/or they have sufficient order history to be trusted to properly manage Auto-Confirm orders.

Hopefully this step will be sufficient.  We’ll keep reviewing how it performs and making adjustments.

While Local Delivery is typically performed by the sellers themselves, Shipping is typically done by a 3rd party commercial carrier such as UPS or FedEx.

Shipping makes boxes available to buyers anywhere in the continental U.S.

As you’ve probably guessed, sellers who offer shipping are designated by the brown truck icon on the left.

Buyer Centered Release

This initial release of Shipping functionality is focused on the buyer side.  Searches within the continental U.S. now always produce a Shipping seller, even if there aren’t any Pickup or Delivery sellers in the area yet.  And if there are other results, the Shipping seller will still appear at the bottom of the results providing additional options and accommodating buyers who prefer to have boxes delivered.

We are still investigating various ways of offering shipping and have not enabled the ability for sellers to offer Shipping directly like they can offer Delivery.  At this point, BoxCycle maintains a single Shipping listing with multiple sellers available to fill orders.  BoxCycle will route orders to the best seller in each specific case.  If you’d like to participate in this test or offer Shipping in other ways, please let us know.

To make ordering easier for buyers, the Shipping seller offers Box Packs and Moving Kits – such as a 3 Bedroom Moving Kit – along with individual boxes.   Box Kit functionality was recently introduced as well.

Shipping is  a big step in BoxCycle becoming a one-stop shop for boxes.  It fills in empty result pages and provides an answer to buyers who require delivery to their home.

Over the next few months we’ll be watching how Shipping is used and making adjustments.   Stay tuned.

But it’s also a perfect sales channel for those heavily involved in the box business: resellers of used and overstock boxes, box manufacturers, discount sellers of moving boxes, and more.  BoxCycle can bring these businesses new customers without sacrificing margins or competing with their own offerings.

These businesses already have their boxes listed for sale on their website, paper catalog, another service, etc.  Copying the same information into BoxCycle is a hassle, especially for sellers with dozens of different box sizes.

Express List eliminates the work. Just point us to your website or  listing and we’ll add you to BoxCycle based on that information.  We’ll preserve your pricing, pickup hours, delivery rules, and policies as much as possible.  We can create your listing from an inventory file or paper catalog as well.

Getting additional exposure from BoxCycle is now as simple as a one-line email.

More Reach for Sellers

Your listing will appear in all search results within your delivery area.  For example, if a buyer searches for sellers within 5 miles and you are 20 miles away, but deliver to the buyer’s location, you’ll appear in their results as a delivery-only option.  This is especially beneficial to sellers who are located outside of major metro areas.

More Visibility

Listings with delivery are made to stand out with a Green Truck icon.

Happier Buyers

Most buyers prefer delivery, some will only order if delivery is available.

Delivery Area and Prices

As a seller, you decide how far you want to deliver and at what prices.  For example, you can set delivery cost to $10 within 5 miles, $20 within 15 miles, $40 within 50 miles, etc.

You can also specify a delivery discount at a certain order size.  For example, you can discount delivery by $10 for buyers who order $50 or more.  In the example above it would give the buyer FREE delivery within 5 miles if they reach $50 (and discounted delivery to other areas).  This discount is made very visible to buyers in the delivery price list and in the shopping cart to encourage them to buy more.

Delivery Commission

BoxCycle commission on delivery charges is only 5%.

How It Works

The delivery order process is very similar to pickup orders with buyer and seller appointment responsibilities exchanged.

As a reminder, for pickup orders buyers select several pickup choices from within seller hours.  The seller then selects a single time when confirming the order.  The buyer is provided with the seller’s address only after the order is confirmed.  The buyer is obligated to show up on time (within 15 minutes of their appointment.)

With deliveries, the buyer chooses 2 time ranges of at least 4 hours each from within seller hours.  At least one range must be 24+ hours in the future.  When confirming the order, the seller selects a single time when they will deliver the boxes.  Buyer’s exact address is provided only after confirmation; only approximate location (accurate to about a block) is available beforehand.  The seller is obligated to deliver within 15 minutes of their appointment.  Seller’s address is never made available to buyers who order delivery.

Check out the Delivery Order Process for more details.

What About Issues?

We already have penalties in place for missing appointments.  Delivery fees are not refundable and delivery discounts will not apply if the buyer misses their appointment or refuses delivery (unless, of course, the seller is at fault.)  If the buyer misses their appointment, the seller can either:

• come back (and the buyer will need to pay penalties + additional delivery fees to reschedule) OR
• simply leave the boxes at, or near the location; the buyer takes responsibility for loss.

Since delivery takes a substantial amount of effort, the seller can decide which of the above options they’d like.  However, to protect buyers, the seller must contact BoxCycle beforehand.  We will notify the buyer by phone and email to give them a chance to make last minute arrangements to minimize loss.

The seller may wait for the buyer at the appointment site, but is never obligated to do so beyond 15 minutes.

See the Buyer Appointment Agreement for more details.

What About Shipping?

Shipping differs from delivery in that it’s generally performed by a commercial carrier like UPS, does not require appointments, and offers tracking.  Shipping isn’t supported in this release, but we expect to add it soon.  If you need shipping, let  us know so we can prioritize.

I Have a Delivery Route; How Do I Make This Work?

At this time we require exact appointments; sellers with an existing route may have trouble predicting their delivery time within 30 minutes.  We hope to be able to offer delivery time ranges (e.g. 2pm-6pm) in the future.  If you need this, let us know so we can prioritize.

What Else?

Delivery has a number of complexities; we’ll be fine-tuning the process as we go along.  Your feedback on this functionality is much appreciated.

We have over 50 different box types and this list is constantly growing.  To make listing simpler and less overwhelming we default to showing just the 5 most common box types.   Potential sellers had to click on the View All Box Types link to see the entire list, but there were a several problems.

Regardless of how hard I tried to make ‘View All’ links prominent, people routinely ignored them.  They’d scroll up and down and leave.  Or they’d call asking when we’ll have a box type available.  The design clearly wasn’t intuitive.

And the people who found the links were greeted with a very long display of box types.  Although the list was sorted, it was quite intimidating.

I’ve always wanted to add a categorization system to the list and finally found the time to do it.   The list is now broken into 9 major categories.  The same 5 boxes are shown by default, but the list of categories makes clear that many other types are available.  Clicking on the category expands it.  Even if all the categories are expanded, the category headers add structure and break up the full list, making it far less intimidating.

Overall it’s far more intuitive and pleasant.  At least it seems that way to me; I’ll be watching how users interact with the new layout.

This change may seem a bit obvious, but there are logical challenges with assigning categories and technical complexities with building a dynamic form that made me not want to add complexity early on.  I was pleasantly surprised by how few issues I ran into getting this implemented.

Most people only come in contact with boxes when moving and don’t grasp the volume of boxes discarded each day.  Nearly every store, office, warehouse, and school receives and discards loads of boxes daily.  Many discard more in day than individuals will use in a lifetime of moving.   That is a large amount of environmental waste.  It’s also a missed opportunity to reduce costs and help the community.  Many organizations spend money getting rid of their boxes when they could actually turn a profit, help their neighbors, and help the environment.  It’s a win for everyone.

But most of them recycle, so what’s the big deal, right?  Some do recycle, but recycling only reduces impact by a little bit.  Local reuse eliminates impact.  Recycling isn’t a great option, it’s just a better option than throwing cardboard away.

I am quite excited about the release of our Help Boxes page.  The focus of this page is to make it easier for people to help BoxCycle grow.  It has suggestions on how to help, graphics you can use to link to us, social networking info, and more.  The success of BoxCycle, and the size of it’s environmental impact, is largely dependent on the size of the seller network we can build and the general public awareness we can raise.   I know there are lots of passionate people out there who’d love to help – this page is the first step in making helping easy.

Join BoxCycle

Kits solve other common problems too.  Many companies looking to get rid of boxes have them stacked on pallets or otherwise prepackaged.  They need to require that boxes are purchased in multiples of a certain quantity.  Minimum Order doesn’t cut it since it still allows someone to purchase 1.5 pallets.  Sellers may also need to relay the type of packaging since it affects equipment needed for pickup (e.g. boxes on pallets).  Box Kits allow sellers to do both.

Or discounting. A seller might be willing to offer a discount when certain quantities and/or combinations of items are purchased, but they don’t want to discount items bought individually.  With kits, setting discounts like this is easy.

You add kits to your BoxCycle Seller Inventory just like any other box type. We currently have 3 Kit types:

• Moving Kit – A combination of boxes specifically designed for moving
• Box Pack – A set of boxes (e.g. 20 Large + 10 Medium)
• Box Pallet – A set of boxes stacked on a pallet (e.g. 500 12x12x10)

Once you add a kit type listing, Edit it to specify the contents, which can be any items in your inventory (even other kits!)  You can leave individual items available for sale independently or restrict them to only be sold as part of a kit. Kits will be priced automatically based on contents.  You can set your own price if you like.

Kits were a much needed feature, here they are!

At this time, we can achieve much of the benefit by simply adding a designation for our best sellers – this is exactly what A+ accomplishes.  It highlights sellers who’ve processed many orders reliably, confirmed appointments quickly, and otherwise dealt with customers in an exemplary manner.  The designation should go a long way in telling customers concerned with uncertainty who their best bet is and, as a result, rewarding high seller performance.

Time Zone Support

I am very excited about the update released today.  BoxCycle now has full time zone support.  To end users used to dealing with a single time zone this may seem like a non-event.  Programmers who’ve never dealt with time zones may think it’s trivial.  But time zones are more difficult to deal with than it first appears and have a been a constant barrier, requiring ugly workarounds that never fully solve the problem.

The scary part about this change is that it’s so all-encompassing.  Although visually you’ll see only minor changes, nearly every section of our site might be impacted and every date in our database had to be updated.  I don’t doubt we’ll run into issues, but this was a required step in the site’s development and I am very happy to have the bulk of the work behind us.  A number of annoying, odd behaviors regarding time were immediately eliminated and several exciting features on the roadmap are now a big step closer to reality.  Woohoo!