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Comment by taylorwc | Hacker News Reader

I can relate to the pain involved of not having a box. Unless I just got something from Amazon, I won't have a usable box. And while the post office may have free boxes, the trip to the post office in and of itself is pain enough to cause breakage [1].

[1] I think I'd rather have my fingers run over by the car than make a trip to the US Post Office. Right up there with the DMV.

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USPS will ship you free boxes, for free.

https://store.usps.com/store/browse/subcategory.jsp?category...

I agree. When I was selling online more frequently, I had a collection of Priority Mail boxes to use, and this still didn't cover all of the sizes I needed. As dumb as it sounds, shipping me the properly sized box would be amazing.

I'm curious if they provide packing material too - that was the other big issue for me. I typically used newspaper or peanuts from a box I had sitting around, but I still ran into trouble a fair amount of the time.

This is exactly the business we are starting.

Check out http://shyp.co

We fit the contents into the perfect size box so even though we charge a little more than going directly to USPS, we can more than make up for it in our efficiencies. Plus real-time comparison to UPS, Fedex and Ontrac is in the works.

For those who don't know, in CA, you can do a lot of the DMV stuff that you can't do online at a AAA office. Cash/check and membership required are the only caveats.

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