Plain New Shipping and Moving Boxes Plus Custom Pricing
The main motivation behind BoxCycle was to make it viable for businesses, organizations, and recyclers to put volumes of used boxes they regularly recycle or trash into the reuse cycle. However, there are number of situations when excess boxes are brand new such as box manufacturer overruns, mistakes in purchasing by shipping departments, changes in business direction, and many more. We’ve been getting an unexpected amount of interest from areas like that and are working to make BoxCycle better fit the needs of those sellers.
We already introduced various box conditions, exact sizing, and price premiums. Today we are extending these capabilities with Plain boxes and custom pricing.
Plain Boxes – Simply Brand New
There are a lot of excess boxes produced by manufacturers due to misprints and custom printing overruns – they are completely new, but have various company printing on them. These are the boxes we had in mind when we introduced the New box condition a little while ago.
Plain boxes do not have any printing or markings; when New, they are exactly brand new boxes. The Plain designation adds a 15% premium to the New box price.
We also allow Inspected boxes to be marked Plain, though the definition of Plain is a bit more liberal and the premium is only 5%. Plain Inspected boxes can have markings or labels as long as they can be easily covered up by a single standard shipping label. The target audience here are shippers who want clean used boxes – no writing or off-brand printing – and probably would not care about anything they can cover up with a label.
We do not allow Plain to be combined with Used at this time.
Custom Prices
We launched BoxCycle with preset prices to make listing easy for our target sellers. A typical shop owner has no time or interest to determine prices for their used boxes – they just want them listed and out the door as quickly and easily as possible. Our list prices were set to give buyers an excellent deal and to give sellers a tremendous markup over scrap value to make the extra effort worthwhile.
The first issue is that there are a number of sellers for whom scrap value is not an appropriate metric. Price premiums were the first step to get these sellers significantly higher returns for what is usually much higher quality inventory. However, premiums are not flexible enough. A large number of sellers of used and new boxes are necessary to make BoxCycle a thriving marketplace and full price flexibility is needed to make this happen.
The second issue is that beyond typical moving box sizes, setting default prices is very difficult. As we get more and more listing requests for shipping boxes letting sellers set the price is the only viable solution for reasonable pricing.
Custom pricing is not replacing list prices. We will continue to have list prices and price premiums for easy selling, as a base of our commission, and as a way to help buyers decide which listings are “cheap” and which are “expensive”. But sellers will be able to set their own prices. Just like with the premiums, we only charge a 5% commission on amount beyond list price.
Instructions
As with previous changes, for the time being sellers will need to contact us to make adjustments to condition and pricing. We are working to build this functionality into the List and Edit Inventory screens, but integrating these changes in a clean way isn’t trivial and will take time. We believe that releasing the functionality without the interface allows us to address buyer and seller concerns faster and build the markeplace.
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