New Stuff! Recently I rolled out a few big updates to the bot. While lots of improvements to the bot are under the hood –  the buying process, new merchants, removing duplicates, improving package quality – this set of changes are all about the interface on bobcatinabox.com/myboxes, which is the site you login to manage your account with the bot. These new features give you more control over your account.

Keyword Search Box
Now instead of scrolling through keywords there is a search box which you can use to quickly select your keywords and enter new ones. This is a big change from the old interface. The bot also now tells you which keywords it has packages for in the database.

Number Of Packages
You can now select how many packages you want within a range (ie 2-4 packages per month or 9-18 packages per month) for each address. There used to be a vague slider bar with no labels on it and graphics that some folks found confusing. It is now more straightforward. Click on the ‘Addresses’ Tab to take a look.

Tune!
This is a new way to give the bot information on what sorts of ppackages you like. There is a link to a new tuning page on the ‘Keywords’ tab that lets you click through a series of images, telling the bot whether you like/don’t like packages that might be associated with each picture. I’m testing this out. Some of the pictures are of “divisive” products that I know some subscribers like and some don’t like (beads for example). Some of the pictures are of people or brands that might tell the bot something about your style.

The bot will always buy products that fit the keywords you’ve selected. But for a lot of keywords, like ‘plastics’ or ‘retro’ or ‘unusual’ there is a lot of wiggle room. Once I’ve enough data I’ll hopefully be able to further tune the purchases that the bot makes.

Login yourself and take a look! Email me if you’ve any questions or anything looks amiss.

If you are subscribed to the bot (and if not, why not) you may have noticed some nifty new icons show up on the ‘Arrived’ tab that shows the packages you have received so far.

We now have a little shopping card and a little tag icon for every item you have received in the mail. What do they do?

Tagging

Click on the tag icon and you go to a screen where you can select which keywords you think are the best match for this item. This helps us pick other items that you are more likely to like. Now if you like/dislike a package, the bot also knows to associate the item with certain keywords and will update its profile for you accordingly. You can use the arrows at the bottom to cycle through the different items you have received. This is part of our Herculean effort to improve the bot’s product-keyword database. The keywords provided by lots of sellers are quite spammy (read more about that here). So we are adding new signals in order to improve the bot.

Buy More

Want to order more of a particular item? Click on the little shopping cart icon and you will get the simple form to the left. Let us know how many you want and where they should go. This is new so we are processing orders manually. You will get an email confirmation from us before the order is finalized. If you want a particular color/size or have questions about buying more of a particular item you can email me at alexander@bobcatinabox.com

What do you think of these changes? I’m looking for new ways to get data on packages into the bot, so watch this space!