Sep 24, 2009 Posted by BoxCycle on Sep 24, 2009 in Site Updates | 0 comments

Box Order Management Is Coming Plus More Exposure for Sellers

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.