Build-a-box
Gist
Personalized box with items selected by the customer.
Full definition
What is build-a-box
A type of subscription box that allows the customer to select a number of items from the merchant’s stock and create their own, personalized box with them. Depending on the options provided by merchants, customers can purchase their boxes one time or add them to a subscription.
How is build-a-box different from curated box
With build-a-box, it’s the customer who decides what specific products will be included in the box, so there’s no surprise involved (although custom boxes can contain extra surprise items added to the order by the merchant). Merchants also select the range of products that will be available for inclusion in the box, so that customers can build their boxes with that range of products only.
In curated boxes, although some choice may be allowed on the customer’s part (between e.g. different color variants of the product), they are typically not the ones who decide what the box will contain. Instead, the content of the box is decided upfront and made known to the customer by the seller.
How to increase AOV and CLT with build-a-box?
Build-a-box is a great tool for personalization that merchants can use to increase customer loyalty and their lifetime value. Apart from personalization itself that allows customers to adjust the volume and type of items in their order to their needs, merchants have a number of tools at their disposal that encourage the customers to add more items to their boxes and retain their subscription for longer:
- tiered (volume) discounts that increase with the number of items added to a box
- free shipping for all box items
- free / surprise gift added to the box
- dynamic boxes that allow for periodic switching of the box content, which keeps the customers engaged