May 9, 2014 Posted by BoxCycle on May 9, 2014 in Site Updates | 0 comments

Dynamic Default Minimum Order

Since launch we had a very small minimum order of $2. We wanted to make sure that anyone could make their boxes available for reuse. If someone wanted to go through the effort with small quantities, we did not want to stay in their way. And this isn’t changing – our minimum order remains $2.

But we’ve changed our default minimum order to $10. Most sellers stick with defaults and many find very small orders an unpleasant surprise. Furthermore, small orders cause issues with appointment fees and incentives since amounts exceed the order amount. This encourages no-shows, adjustments, and cancellations by buyers, less care by sellers, and more special handling on orders that are already unprofitable for us and the seller. A $10 order is still small, but is hopefully large enough to encourage better service from sellers and keep buyers accountable for showing up as promised.

Sellers who don’t mind spending time on smaller orders can simply override the default, as can sellers who’d like to require even larger orders.

The new default minimum order amount is also dynamic. When the default is used, the minimum order will decrease automatically when total remaining inventory drops below $10. It will become the total amount of seller inventory (down to the nearest whole dollar) as long as it’s at least $2. This should help sellers with small amount of inventory by eliminating the need to think about the minimum order.

This change applies automatically to all existing sellers who did not specify a minimum order manually.