03 — Order Tracker
Mystery Box Tracker
Build a tracker in two weeks before launch of the new Mystery Box sale? Sure why not! CBA (Chase Bliss Audio) makes killer guitar pedals, and they call the Mystery Box a “cuboid of infinite possibility”. Each costs less than any pedal they sell and holds at least one, plus an art print and custom dice, and some hide an unreleased pedal or a bonus from one of 60-plus pedal maker friends. Apparently it was a hit on blisscord.
03.1 — Look one up
Hit the link, I made a demo order for testing purposes
03.2 — Three steps
- 1Enter your order number
- 2See your zone and its dates
- 3Watch your zone ship
03.3 — The idea
Boarding groups
Mr. Knobs didn't want one giant progress bar. One long line, he said, feels terrible, like boarding a plane, but groups feel manageable. So orders ship in zones, and you only see progress once yours is shipping.
03.4 — The words
Packed up, not on its way
Zach, Director of Operations, Chief Box Hugger and composer of Music for Rectangles, sends every box off like it's going to a friend. The shipping email goes out when the label prints, so the page says yours is being packed up.
03.5 — Behind it
Nobody types anything
It reads all five Chase Bliss stores on Squarespace, plus ShipStation, so nobody types in what's shipped. Zach says how many boxes go in each zone, and it works out which zone every order lands in. Nobody misses the Google Sheet.
03.6 — Sale night
Gone in 19½ hours
The Mystery Box went on sale at 8:50 on a Wednesday night and sold out at 4:18 the next afternoon. The tracker posted in Slack every time a zone filled up.
Buyers started checking the tracker as soon as they'd paid, and kept at it all night. In its first ten days it answered more than 35,000 lookups, two in three from a phone.
03.7 — Made of
ReactTypeScriptViteSquarespace APIShipStation API
76,574 lookupsEach dayShare
- 01United States49%
- 02United Kingdom10%
- 03Germany8%
- 04Canada4%
- 05Japan4%
- 06Netherlands3%
- 07France2%
- 08Australia2%
+69 more countries