kevingibbon

My company has used them before. I thought the same before using them. However I was surprised the level of talent they have. For a super senior dev the context that you need for most projects isn’t as much as you think.

It was a net positive for us. Sped up our developer process given its so hard to hire senior devs right now.

They also have domain experts. So say you are using some tech your team isn’t as familiar in. Great to get some extra eyes of that code to check for security issues, potential computation issues etc.

Also they are much more broader than their company name suggests. Think of them as developers as a service. In this hiring environment it’s much needed.

Azure in REAL plain English: Microsoft AWS

I really wish it was that easy. We have tested a bunch of different things and there is no solution that works 100% of the time. For example.. there is no standard fragile item. A fragile item could be 2" of padding or could be 10" of padding.

The #1 most important thing is that the item arrives safely. #2 is reducing the price our customer pay. We even have machinery to create custom on-demand boxes to .1 of an inch so we don't ship air.

Starting today..For customers that are very price sensitive they can package their items, not pay the $5 pickup and still be able to use our great UX/price comparison technology.

We do not use shippo for this product.

For this new product, no. We use a ton of different technologies to make different parts of our business work. We prefer to focus on solving consumer + smb pain points vs owning the entire stack ourselves.

thanks for the feedback. With this new label product you can package your items yourself and print the labels. You get a final price in app/web before purchase.

With our pickup/packaging business there is no way to give a price up front. Only to give an estimate based on the information we receive. There are too many variables that go into the packaging process (padding, re-arranging items, multiple boxes etc). Something that I would love to be perfect on but its a very hard problem.

We typically split items into multiple boxes for safety or to reduce the cost of the overall shipments. There are some very high oversize fees from the carriers that we try to avoid as much as possible.

I hope you will give this new product a try :)

it really depends on a number of things. Fedex and UPS proximity play a part but other things like availability of a suitable warehouse in a reasonable amount of time is more important.

We break into a city starting in a tight geography and expand outwards.

We don't consider Berkeley or Oakland as new cities as we can provide service from one warehouse. We will be overing service to those areas very shortly.

You can select 'shipping options' and get a quote in there.

We are continuously A/B testing every interaction and hiding the price in a sub-menu helped across the board.