はこBOON

» see takuhai.jp/hacoboon/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Every courier in Japan charges you for the size of the box. You add the three dimensions together and that lands you in a price band. はこBOON charged for the weight and the distance, which sounds like a small difference until you are the person trying to post a lampshade. Light and bulky was the case it was built for, and light and bulky is most of what gets sold on an auction site.

It arrived on Wednesday 3 March 2010 to fill a hole. Yahoo! JAPAN had been running Yahoo!ゆうパック with Japan Post and that ended on 1 July 2009, leaving auction sellers without a cheap integrated option for eight months. The replacement was assembled out of four companies. Itochu held the delivery contract and Yahoo! JAPAN brought the auction site with the accounts attached to it, while FamilyMart and its e-commerce arm supplied thousands of counters that were already open all night.

The flow was deliberately offline at the end. You filled in the shipment on the website, which issued a sixteen-digit reception number, and you had thirty days from the next morning to take that number to a FamilyMart and type it into the Famiポート kiosk. The kiosk printed the paperwork and the staff took the parcel, and Yamato Transport collected from that store at least once a day. Freight came out of your pocket at the counter or out of a Yahoo! Wallet card, and either way you got one percent of it back in T-Points.

On 9 May 2017 the operators announced that the contract with Yamato Transport had reached its end and that counter acceptance would stop on 9 August. They called it a suspension. Almost eleven months later, on 3 April 2018, the official site admitted they had given up on restarting and set the closing date for 2 May 2018.

~ the chronicle ~

~ priced by weight ~

Pricing by weight creates a problem that pricing by size does not, which is that the customer has to tell you the number. はこBOON took the weight as a self-declaration at the point of booking, and FamilyMart's staff did not check it. The real weighing happened later, at the Yamato branch that picked the parcel up, and if your parcel came in heavier than you said, you got billed the difference afterwards plus a fifty-two yen settlement fee, and your account was frozen out of the service until you paid it.

I have posted a lot of parcels in my life and have never once been asked what one weighed before it left my hands. Everywhere I have shipped from, a person behind a counter looks at the box and tells you which band it falls into. Building the whole tariff on a number the sender supplies at home, with the correction arriving by invoice weeks later, is an unusual piece of trust to put into a consumer product.

The limits around it were ordinary enough: 160 centimeters across the three sides added together, 25 kilograms maximum. Compensation was capped at 300,000 yen of actual loss, split across two schemes, one covering the parcel while it sat behind the FamilyMart counter and Yamato's own covering it from pickup onward. Auction sellers who could document the transaction could claim the winning bid instead of the goods' value, up to the same ceiling.

~ when yamato said no ~

2017 was the year Yamato Transport stopped absorbing. Parcel volumes from online retail had grown faster than the drivers available to carry them, and the company responded by raising its basic home-delivery fares for the first time in nearly three decades and by capping how much it would take from its largest shippers. A discount service for individual auction sellers, priced on terms agreed in 2010 and held through somebody else's contract, was exactly the kind of commitment that did not survive that year.

The unusual part of this death is that the product itself was fine. Nothing leaked and nobody sued, and demand had not gone anywhere. Four large companies spent eleven months looking for another carrier willing to move light bulky parcels out of convenience stores at that price, and the answer kept coming back no.

~ the version that shipped to a shelf ~

There was a second, stranger one. はこBOON mini used the convenience chain's own internal restocking network instead of a courier, which made it cheaper and much slower, and it could only ever deliver to a FamilyMart rather than to your house. You picked the store yourself, and the parcel traveled there on the same trucks that brought the onigiri.

It outlasted its parent by eight weeks. Bookings closed on 17 April 2018 and the in-store handover stopped a month later, on 17 May. The service itself ended on 30 June 2018. takuhai.jp answers nothing today, so the only way to read either closure notice is through the Internet Archive.

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