Ecommerce businesses need to stockpile a lot of boxes ahead of time for shipping captured orders without delay. They also need to strike a balance between cost-efficiency and a memorable delivery and unpacking experience. Brandable Box is a Shopify app that helps Shopify merchants forecast their shipping needs based on historical data and then order cheap boxes customized with their logo. Everything without leaving the Shopify dashboard.
Brandable Box brings affordable boxes to Shopify merchants
Affordable branded boxes used to be available only to household names such as Home Depot, Walmart, Public Storage, USPS. But not anymore! Here comes Brandable Box – a Shopify app bringing the same value to the small and medium businesses all over America.
Pratt Industries, the provider of Brandable Box services, is America’s 5th largest corrugated packaging company and the world’s largest, privately-held 100% recycled paper and packaging company. Pratt is manufacturing, among others, various sizes of affordable shipping boxes customizable with your logo.
In order to reach a wider audience, Pratt decided to build a Shopify app to allow Shopify merchants to forecast their shipping needs and order boxes straight from their store dashboard.
How many boxes will be enough?
“How many boxes do I need for next month, next quarter?” is the question every ecommerce owner or manager has to answer each month.
Pratt’s GM Ecommerce Derick Jaros proposed to answer that question for over 110K Shopify stores in the US and over a million globally by developing a Shopify app that taps directly into a merchant’s historical data.
Spark Solutions accepted the challenge to deliver the app which:
- is available through the Shopify app store,
- plugs in into merchant’s Shopify dashboard,
- crunches the merchant’s historical order data,
- forecaststs the merchant’s shipping needs,
- allows to customize the boxes in various sizes,
- integrates with Pratt’s fulfillment systems to manufacture the boxes.
Developing Brandable Box Shopify app
The app has been delivered in an agile manner with Pratt’s product and marketing team collaborating with Spark team over a number of product design and development sprints.
We’ve started with digital product and UX design activities, so:
- gathering Shopify customer base insights,
- investigating technical capabilities of Shopify APIs,
- researching Shopify shipping integrations,
- identifying customer user groups and their needs,
- mapping user flows leading to a purchase,
- designing UX mockups for client review and feedback,
- designing final app layouts and functional specification,
- planning the project delivery backlog in Jira.
MVP delivery phase involved the client’s product team and Spark UX designer overseeing a team of developers and testers implementing the app in several iterations with frequent show and tell sessions. We’ve worked in one-week sprints pushing code to the staging environment often to allow for frequent QA and User Acceptance Testing feedback.
Pushing latest app improvements to production had to be phased to allow for Shopify app store review to take place. Once we’ve received feedback from the Shopify team we’ve adjusted the app itself and its app store details.
Tech stack used to develop Brandable Box:
- Ruby on Rails
- React
- Shopify App gem
- Recharts for charts
- RSpec for tests
- Active Admin for the admin panel
- Webpacker
- Heroku cloud hosting
How to use Brandable Box?
It takes only three simple steps to estimate the number of boxes you’ll need next month and order custom branded boxes using the Brandable Box Shopify app:
Step 1: Upload your logo
This logo will appear on all of your boxes
Step 2: Check your order forecast
Specify how many boxes you need based on your order forecast
Step 3: Configure your boxes
Specify your logo size, color and where to place it
Summary
Brandable Box is a Shopify app bringing value to Shopify merchants by supplying them with affordable and customized boxes so they can avoid shipping delays in case they run out of boxes. Thanks to order forecasting each Shopify merchant may stockpile enough boxes to fulfill their customers’ orders.
Pratt Industries has tapped into the Shopify customer base widening its target audience by not only supplying boxes but also insights into how to manage merchant’s business continuity.
Spark Solutions delivered a Shopify app consuming Shopify APIs and integrating into Pratt’s order fulfillment solutions in an agile methodology in several one-week sprints in close collaboration with the client’s product and marketing team.
