We’ve added a new Require feature to Buy Boxes and Wanted sections search that allows users to show only listings that include boxes of a specific type.

For example, if you are looking for moving boxes, but are only interested in buying if you can get Wardrobes at the same time you can now select a Wardrobe box type from the Require drop-down and search. Only sellers who have Wardrobes as one of the boxes in their listing will be shown in search results.

This feature is especially useful when searching for gaylord boxes, specific size shipping boxes, and other box types that tend to be available at a small percentage of the sellers and are hence difficult to search for by browsing.

A few things to note:

• An entire listing is shown, as long as it includes the box type you require
• You cannot yet search for a specific box size, but you can use box types to restrict by length.
• You may want to try a few searches since some boxes can be listed under multiple possible types (e.g. Gaylord Box, Box – 38-48″).
• To search beyond 100 miles please contact us.
• Many listings in the Wanted section do not include a box type so you may end up hiding listings you’d like to see.

We’ve added support for two new box attributes: Test/Strength and Maximum Weight Capacity. Seller listings can now include these details and Wanted Listings can now request that boxes match these attributes.

Test is a standard measure of box strength. It also hints at how heavy the box is. It is measured using either Bursting Test (# Test) or Edge Crush Test (ECT).

Maximum Weight Capacity indicates the maximum weight a box is designed to hold in pounds. This value is most useful for buyers of larger boxes and bulk cargo boxes. To minimize clutter we don’t currently show this attributes for other box types.

Both attributes can be found on the round Box Certification Seal present on most boxes.

Our recently released Seller Wanted Listings made it easy to buy boxes wholesale on BoxCycle. They also made it possible to sell through BoxCycle without creating a listing and holding inventory, something that was frequently requested by users.

Today, we are expanding access to Seller Wanted Listings to buyers who aren’t also selling boxes. Our focus is on buyers who are looking for larger quantities and/or have a regular need for boxes, but all types of buyers are supported.

Buyers who create (or already have) a regular Wanted Listing / Notification Request, with specific box information, will see an invitation on their listing page to convert to a Seller Wanted Listing. A seller account is still required to have a Seller Wanted Listing, but the conversion process automatically copies buyer details from the Notification Request to make this step easier. After the conversion, the buyer can optionally update buy prices or setup their pickup rules.

Since custom buy prices and buyer-only listings accommodate transactions that weren’t originally possible, buyer commission is now calculated from either quantity or value instead of just quantity: see the latest buyer fee details.

We are excited about enabling and expanding this new way to reuse cardboard boxes.

Last week we released a feature we’ve been working on for a long time: Seller Wanted Listings.

Custom Prices

We’ve now removed one of the limitations of the first release – lack of ability to set custom buy prices. With today’s update, buyers can specify prices they are willing to pay for boxes they are requesting. Automatic pricing is still available; simply leave the price blank and we’ll set the buy price to 10% of the suggested retail price.

Notification of Matching Retail Listings

If you have a Seller Wanted Listing, it’s now easy to be notified when new boxes matching your wanted listing are created on the retail side of BoxCycle: just check the Notify Me checkbox on your Seller Wanted Listing. Retail listings are regular listing created by sellers through the Sell Boxes section of BoxCycle.

This is perfect if there are situation when you’d want to buy boxes you are requesting at retail prices. This feature doesn’t create any commitments. You’ll get an email when a new seller lists something that matches what you are requesting. You can then either purchase the newly listed boxes or ignore the notification.

BoxCycle got a significant new piece of functionality today: Seller Wanted Listings. Existing sellers can now request specific boxes they want to buy and anyone can sell matching boxes to them. Seller Wanted Listing Transactions use essentially the same checkout system, order management system, and processing rules as normal Retail Orders with buyer and seller roles reversed.

You can find details on the BoxCycle Buying and Selling Used Boxes with Wanted Listings Help Page.

Selling

Most people who contact us about selling boxes just want to drop them off somewhere or, if possible, get them picked up. They are generally more concerned with convenience than with profit. Seller Wanted Listings fill their need. Sellers can see matching buyers in their area, schedule an appointment, and submit their request online. No account is required.

Buying

Seller Wanted Listings enable Wholesale Purchases through BoxCycle. While prices on BoxCycle are generally very competitive for retail purchases, they are usually too high to enable buying for resale through the site. Seller Wanted Listings enable resale buying. They also allow sellers to get boxes they need for themselves very cheaply. It isn’t unusual for businesses to constantly want to get rid of certain box sizes while always needing other sizes.

Limitations

These may be removed in future revisions based on feedback, but for this first release:

• Buyers cannot set a minimum order. However, small orders aren’t likely since sellers pay a fee to place an order.
• Prices are set at approximately 10% of list price and cannot be adjusted.
• Retail Delivery and Wanted Pickup cannot be separated. If you offer Delivery for your Retail Listing, you will also be offering Pickup for your Wanted Listing under the same terms.
• Unflattened boxes must be accepted, though buyers can pay up to 50% less for them.
• Expiration Date, Auto-Confirm, and Lead-Time settings are shared between Retail and Wanted listings.

Process and Fees

Sellers pay a $10 commission on successful sales with their payment details collected during order placement. Although it’s unusual to give payment details when selling, this is essential for us to be able to get a high level of commitment from sellers and enforce fees for unreliable behavior, much like we do with Retail Orders. This fee also has the effect of encouraging larger transactions.

Ordering process and management is very similar to Retail Orders with buyer and seller roles reversed. Buyers will hopefully only see a minimally higher time involvement for these orders. The main differences are that buyers pay sellers directly at meeting in cash and both parties have more freedom to resolve issues at meeting without our involvement.

Buyers do not not pay fees for Wanted Orders of 200 boxes or less unless they charge for Pickup. In that case we’ll collect Pickup charges from the seller at order time (to make sure the buyer gets paid for pickup if the seller flakes) and charge a 5% commission on the collected amount.

If the order is over 200 boxes, BoxCycle charges the buyer a $5 commission for each block of 100 boxes after the first 200 with a $30 maximum. This fee is collected during order confirmation.

Conclusion

Although there is some overlap, Seller Wanted Listings and our Retail Seller Listings are focused on different kinds of transactions. Seller Wanted Listings are optimized around connecting buyers who continuously need boxes for resale or use with, often one-time, retail sellers. In contrast, our Retail Seller Listings are optimized around connecting sellers with a continuous supply of boxes with, often one-time, retail buyers.

We look forward to your feedback to help us improve this feature over the coming months.

BoxCycle acts like an escrow service by collecting money from the buyer to establish and enforce their commitment to the order and only paying the seller after they successfully honor the buyer’s order.

After the appointment time passes the buyer must have a chance to report issues for a reasonable period of time. At the same time, sellers often want to get paid as soon as possible. Both parties may want to have a chance to report order status shortly after appointment, but may also not want to be bothered much or at all.

We finally have the order completion step implemented in a way that feels right:

• Both buyers and sellers can report appointment status shortly after appointment time
• If buyer reports success, the order is considered successful
• If seller reports success, it does not become binding until about 6 hours have passed since appointment time. The buyer can override completion by reporting issues any time before then; if nothing is reported then the order gets completed automatically. In addition, the buyer will receive an immediate notification when seller marks the order complete telling them how long they have to report issues.
• If neither party reports order status the buyer will receive a reminder within about a day.
• If neither party reports order status after about 2 days, BoxCycle will complete it automatically.

This setup seems to do the right things automatically, while giving both parties the ability to take action immediately without giving the seller power to get paid by incorrectly reporting success.

Continuing with a trend of new features enabled by Twilio, we’ve added automatic order confirmation calls.  BoxCycle doesn’t allow buyers to pickup boxes right after placing an order; the seller needs to confirm box availability and select the final appointment time before the buyer is provided with the pickup location (see How It Works).  So effective communication with sellers is crucial.

We automatically notify sellers of new orders by email, fax, and text messaging.  If they don’t reply in a reasonable period of time, we follow up by phone.  What’s ‘reasonable’ depends on the urgency of buyer’s order, time of the potential appointment, seller order history, and more.  We want to minimize seller time investment and annoyance, so we don’t want to bother them by phone when they’ve just received an email and there is plenty of time for them to respond.  But we also don’t want to delay the buyer or wait on a seller when our email is in their Spam box or when they no longer have boxes and don’t feel the need to reply to us.

Automating these initial confirmation calls to sellers removes business hours considerations from calling, reduces human error, and allows us to integrate all the factors in a consistent manner.  We can take into account buyer urgency, seller history, previous calls, etc. to contact the seller just enough.

Automatic calls also enable us to offer sellers options for dealing with orders directly over the phone, something that can be more efficient and more appealing to some sellers.

Of course, sellers can still connect to our support team by phone and we’ll continue to make manual calls when automatic calls do not receive a timely response.  But automatic calls should let us add consistency to the process leading to faster confirmations for buyers without extra annoyance or work for sellers.

We now offer notification options by text message along with email, fax, and phone.

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.

We are happy to announce that we now support Shipping along with recently introduced Local Delivery.

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.

A while ago I wrote about changes to buyer appointment choice selection.  The basic idea worked well, but the initial implementation handled some situations less than ideally.  We only used the appointment start time to determine if buyer choices provide a sufficient time range when short-notice and are within seller lead time requirements.

With today’s release we started to use the entire range supplied by the buyer to make appointment choices more flexible and lenient. 

In case of lead times, this means that as long as the latest point in the range meets the requirement, the appointment choice will be allowed.  As an example, lets take a buyer who  places an order at 8pm on Tuesday from a seller who has a 1 day lead time.  Previously, buyer’s appointment choices had to start after 8pm on Wednesday.  Now, the buyer can select 1pm +7 hours.  Since the end of the range is 8pm the appointment choice will be accepted.  The seller still gets their lead time, but has the option of accepting an earlier time when possible (which tends to be quite often.)

For short-notice appointments we now compare the latest time of the later appointment with the start time of the earlier appointment to make sure they are 5+ hours apart.  This means that appointments like 10am for 1st Choice and 1pm + 3 hours for 2nd Choice will now be accepted.  Previously, the 2nd Choice in this example would have to start after 3pm.

These changes allow for a wider range of reasonable appointment choices and make order placement easier and more flexible for buyers.