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 12×12x10)

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!

The approach is empirical, well researched, yet accessible enough.  In the process, the book becomes a reference for approaching energy issues.  The numbers and calculations alone are invaluable – too many great discussions reach stalemates because finding and synthesithing the data is so hard.

The book is a great example of how to think about complex issues.  Save for a few paragraphs of personal opinion, everything in the book comes down to numbers.  Actual numbers, not “huge” or “large” or “tiny”.  Instead of saying, “electric cars and biodiesel will save us” the author calculates energy impact and then determines the magnitude of savings (or loses).

Taking a comprehensive and rational look at things is so much harder than simply rallying behind a cause or simply saying ‘no’.  Even getting the numbers is hard, much less making sense of them.  Yet simple approaches are much more appealing and sadly much more influential in driving our decisions.

This book is a reference manual for numbers and processes, a guide to solving environmental issues, and an example of how to properly think about complex issues.  In the end, it makes discussing environmental and energy issues much simpler.  I hope people will actually use it.  The author does too – the electronic version of the book is available for FREE.

Buyers Can Get Driving Time and Directions Prior to Ordering

Location information is crucial for buyers.  Distances and zoomable map of seller locations provide much of what is needed, but there are a few issues.

Distance is direct ‘as the crow flies’, not driving distance.  This problem isn’t specific to BoxCycle; very few sites display the driving distance.  Direct distance is generally a decent enough estimate and is much faster and simpler to calculate.

However, sometimes it can vary significantly from driving distance which can catch buyers by surprise, especially when they aren’t familiar with the area.

In addition, some buyers are uncomfortable with ordering without having seller’s exact address.  Since locations are provided with accuracy of about a block, I don’t see a logical reason for this, but I have a few explanations.  For one, some people are simply uncomfortable with uncertainty.  Second, some people do not understand the level of information that is provided to them.

It seems that some people ignore the map, miss the relationship between markers and listings, or do not use zoom features to get detailed information on seller’s location.  Making the map work better and making the relationship between listings, map, and distance clearer has been a focus point for the last few months with a number of important improvements as a result.

But offering driving distance, time, and directions can solve these problems automatically.  By seeing directions buyers get a level of certainty about seller location, how long it will take to get there, and what time they may want to make the trip regardless of whether they understand how to interact with the map.

To get driving directions to a seller, click on the distance in their listing.

Seller Surveys

We think up ideas to improve BoxCycle all the time, often in response to something that isn’t working as expected.  Some ideas seem likely to work and are simple enough to implement that we just do it and see if it works.  Others are more complex or can be disruptive to our existing model.  Some contradict each other.  And when guessing customer needs, even ideas that feel certain are often wrong.

To help us decide which ideas match customer needs, we’ve introduced seller surveys.  Existing sellers can tell us what they think is missing by checking a few check boxes. 

Of course, there is a lot of reliability issues with surveys as well, so it’s just another tool among others, but an important one.  Not only does it give us early feedback, it tells us who may be interested in beta-testing the feature or providing more information on how it should work.

Appointment Reminders

Forgotten appointments isn’t something we expected to deal with much.  And perhaps we haven’t dealt with it that much, but it nevertheless feels like too much. 

To help with the issue, we now send buyers an email reminder on the morning of their appointment.

However, we are quite wary of sending too many emails, making too many phone calls, and otherwise annoying buyers and sellers.  We want the process to be as efficient and unobtrusive as possible.

So we only send one reminder in the morning of the appointment and only if order placement and appointment are a few days apart.  I doubt anyone wants to receive a reminder on Sat morning about an order they placed on Friday night.

Order Import is “Finished”!

All the order history has now been imported into our new online system.  Sellers can see all their orders, get accurate balance information, and request payments.  So why “finished” in quotes?  The import process was quite complicated in a labor intensive sort of way.  It’s quite a relief to get it over with.  However, I would be a fool to believe that a process with so much manual work has been done perfectly.  I expect that we’ll find mistakes and will need to make adjustments, but it’s happily “finished enough”.

No More PayPal Fees On Seller Payouts

I am sure this will be most welcome news for sellers.  In the past we sent payments through the regular PayPal process.  It took effort for us and meant that sellers ended up paying PayPal fees on their payouts.

Today, we completed payout process integration using PayPal Mass Payments.  Not only will sellers get paid faster, but we’ll now cover the PayPal fees!  With no cost and quick payouts PayPal should be the preferred payout method for sellers.   Since it’s easier to automate, it’s better for us as well.  And our cost for Mass Payments is very reasonable.

Order Completion Process Improvements

How do we know that an order was completed successfully?  We simply assume that it was unless we are notified by either buyer or seller.  If no one yells within a day or two after pickup we complete the order, charge the buyer, and pay the seller.  Typically, this works well and doesn’t require us to bother anyone more than necessary.

But there’ve been surprisingly many buyers (and some sellers) who don’t report issues at all.  Or at least not until they see a charge on their card.  We don’t charge the card precisely because we want to identify issues before completing the order, but they use the charge as the trigger to report issues.  I guess they assume that lack of charge means we know what happened.

Resolving issues gets harder and more expensive as time passes, especially if seller has already been paid.  So we’ve taken a number of steps to encourage proper reporting:

1. Buyers or sellers can mark orders complete or report issues online at any time after their appointment.
2. Unmarked orders are completed automatically after about 3 days.
3. Buyer confirmation emails now feature more explicit and prominently displayed instructions on how to contact us in case of pickup issues and what the timeline is for reporting issues before the order is considered complete.
4. Buyers are now sent an email within 24 hours of their appointment reminding them that issues must be reported within a day.

Seller Item Profits Shown/Recorded with Increased Precision

Since commission is percentage based and seller profit is buyer price minus commission, actual seller profit can have a large number of significant digits after the decimal point.  We’ve always calculated seller payouts by only rounding the final result.  It’s the most accurate method, but now that we store orders and show invoices to sellers we need to store and display per item profit.

We could round profit on each item to 2 digits, but this can have a measurable effect on the final result.  Although each item can only be wrong by less than 1/2 cent, the error is compounded by the number of items in the order.  If we store and display to 2 digits, but calculate without rounding, subtotals and totals will be inaccurate and confusing.

We could also simply not display per item profit.  It is quite common for commission/discounts to just be displayed as a separate line on invoices.  However, most sellers care quite a bit about what they make on each item and some set item prices based on profit they want to make.

Our solution is to store, display, and calculate based on item profit rounded to 4 significant digits.  For example, instead of $0.60 or $0.5953424… we’ll show and use $0.5953.  Using 4 significant digits reduces calculation inaccuracies to an acceptable level while allowing us to display per item profit.

One downside is profit display becomes a littler stranger and more cumbersome with 3-4 digits behind the decimal point.  The other downside is that sellers who enter data into their own systems still have to solve the rounding problem for themselves (assuming their system only supports 2 significant digits.)

It may not be a perfect solution, but it seems to offer the best balance.

Buyers can:

• Access up to date order status, status history, and order details online at any time
• View seller address and get directions for confirmed orders
• Mark orders complete after pickup or report issues with pickup
• Transfer cancelled orders to other sellers without re-entering their details
• Get order confirmations faster

Sellers can:

• View order details including buyer prices and their profit online at any time
• Confirm orders with a few clicks without our involvement
• Request order adjustments and cancellations online
• Mark orders complete and report issues with pickups
• Access their order history (orders prior to 8/13/09 are slowly getting imported into the system)
• See their outstanding balance and payment history
• Request manual payouts at any time

This release lets us streamline the order process, improve efficiency, and enable functionality you’ll be seeing over the next few months.  It’s the last big chunk of ‘basic’ functionality and I am ecstatic to have it finished.