Item Of The Day: Resurrection Plant

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A subscriber wrote in with a picture of this very unusual and interesting resurrection plant.  She writes “The plant is awesome. It is basically dead and can survive like that for years apparently. Then when you add water it comes back to life. This is what it looks like after a couple of hours in water [see below picture]. You should get the bot to buy this for others.”
https://www.bobcatinabox.com/myboxes/ximages/product/image6397.jpg

The top picture is how the plant shows up, the bottom picture the subscriber sent in after it had been in water for a few hours.

First Bought
Feb 4, 2016

Keywords
plant
unusual
witch

The Bot Gets A Shiny New Interface

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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.

Faster Bot Reporting

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Until a few days ago, the bot hasn’t reported packages that it had bought until it got confirmation from the vendors and had sourced product images…. which resulted in oftentimes a big delay between when the bot placed an order and when it showed up on the site. No More!

I’ve updated the bot to start reporting packages ordered immediately. It will still take time for us to get the exact estimated arrival date and keywords for packages. However as soon as an order is created you will see it as a ‘mystery’ package with very large estimated arrival window. Once the bot has confirmed a purchase for that order it will tell you what keywords were used and more precisely when it will show up.