BoxCycle Blog

It’s been another busy month.  Here are some of the bigger improvements introduced to BoxCycle since the last post.

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.

With order management out of the way I am in the zone.   Revelations, solutions, and updates seem to come easy.  Most of them are hiding quietly in the background, but there are some worth mentioning.

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.

Online order management I talked about in the last post is now live.  It’s going to enable a lot of very cool functionality in the future, but first things first.  Here is what it means today.

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.

There haven’t been many posts on the blog, but there has been quite a bit of product development happening at BoxCycle.

Among the notable improvements released over the last few months is significant additional online exposure sellers now get by listing with us.  This was accomplished through improvements to our sitemap generation, addition of seller specific pages, and feeds to a variety of third party services as well as twitter.  Getting sellers exposure is an important area that I hope to write more about in the future.

In this post I’d like to give an update on where the bulk of development time has been going: online order management.  For sellers this means being able to see their order history, confirm new orders, request payments, and post issues.   For buyers this means being able to get current status of their order, request modifications, and report problems.

Having online order management reduces friction in transactions and eliminates many of the common issues we deal with.  The benefits are obvious to the point where many companies would probably not even launch without this functionality.  However, I believe that launching early and improving is a better path.  This gives more time to build the market, offers real-world experience on how orders should be managed, and focuses on first resolving issues that affect getting the orders in the first place.

However, we are now at a point where order management is beginning to block progress.  Implementing it is necessary for a slew of features that are next for BoxCycle.  Features that now directly affect getting orders and spreading the word.  And removing friction from the order process is more important now than it has been before.

So this is what is being worked on.  Order management is quite complex and time consuming to implement.  Importing all the old data is also not terribly fun.   But at this point, I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  I am hoping that a publicly visible subset of functionality will be available within a few weeks.

I can hardly wait to get this done.  There are so many exciting improvements that will become possible once the order management groundwork is complete.  And it will become easier to adjust the system to deal with new issues we discover as we process new orders.