How can we help?
Every answer on this site is indexed, including the questions below. For anything technical, the developer documentation is the accurate account.
Topics
Licensing and tiers
What a licence covers, how a quote is built, and what happens when you outgrow a tier.
A running deployment
Activation, upgrades and domains. What runs in your environment and what does not.
Security and residency
Written for the people who have to review it, including the one decision worth raising early.
Building on Box
API behaviour, package contracts, CLI commands. Generated from the repository the engine ships from.
Releases and upgrades
How a package version reaches a deployment, and why nothing changes until you run it.
Availability
If something operated centrally is degraded it is posted on the status page before it reaches a mailbox.
The questions that come up
What exactly am I licensing?
A tier, which decides which packages your box may install. The registry serves only what your activation entitles.
How is a price quoted?
In three parts: the deployment licence by tier, annual access at 30 to 50 percent of that licence, and Connect per merchant per month. Never as a share of transactions, so you set your merchants' fees and keep that margin.
Can we evaluate before committing?
Yes. A box runs on a laptop from a single licence key, so your team can work against real data before the commercial conversation concludes.
How long to a branded pilot?
About four weeks after that, most of it your brand and your DNS rather than our software. Ninety days to live on your own rails is the number we plan against.
What happens when we outgrow a tier?
Re-activate the licence and install. The nesting is asserted at build time, so an upgrade can only ever add.
Do our merchants ever see Box?
No. The console, the websites and the till carry your brand and your domains. Box is the licence and the packages, not a name on the screen.
Where does the data live?
In your database, in the environment you chose. You self-host the engine and the console, so merchant, order and transaction records never leave your infrastructure.
Who processes payments?
You do. Payments, mailers and settlement banking are bound to ports rather than hard-wired, so you supply the implementations. If you are the institution, the rails are already yours.
Do you sell to merchants in our market?
No. Where you hold a licence, Box does not sell to merchants, market to them or onboard them. Box runs its own deployment, and it is the default only in markets with no licensee. The boundary is geography and it is in the agreement.
What is actually installed?
Roughly fifty engine packages, each owning one domain, composed into a single API at install time. A box installs only the packages its tier entitles.
Can a merchant sell in person and online from the same records?
Yes, and that is the point of the model. A terminal sale and a web sale are the same order against the same catalogue, customer and settlement path.
How do upgrades reach a running deployment?
You run the upgrade. It pulls the package versions your activation allows and restarts against them. Nothing changes underneath you.
What if our question is not here?
The documentation is the accurate account, and we answer email. Box is early and every deployment is one we know by name.
Basic
Email. Two business days.
Growth
A shared channel. One business day.
Enterprise
A named contact. Contractual response targets.
There is no public ticket portal yet. Box is early and every deployment is one we know by name, so support runs through the channel your tier entitles rather than a queue.
Get in touch See what each tier includesWhen something is wrong at two in the morning
Your deployment runs on your infrastructure, so most incidents are yours to see first and yours to fix. That is the arrangement working, and it changes what support has to be.
Your monitoring, not ours. We cannot page you about a box we do not watch. The deployment sits inside the estate your team already instruments, which means you find out before we could have told you.
Roll back to the package set. A deployment is the packages in it, so the fastest recovery from a bad upgrade is moving back to the set you were on. No restore, no migration, and the counter keeps selling either way.
The till does not stop. Retail Rails queues offline and reconciles when it reconnects, so an outage of the deployment, the network or us is a reporting problem rather than a trading one.
Before you contact us
Two minutes of the right information turns a day of back and forth into one reply. These are the things we will ask for anyway.
The package set you are on. box packages list --installed. Almost every "it worked last week" question is answered by the difference between two package sets.
Which port is involved. A payment that did not clear is usually the adapter behind the payment port rather than the engine in front of it, and the two have different owners.
One merchant, or all of them. A single merchant behaving oddly is usually configuration or entitlement. Every merchant behaving oddly is the deployment, and we look in different places for each.
What we can commit to being up
Your deployment runs on your infrastructure, so its availability is yours and not ours to promise. That is the arrangement working as intended: a bad afternoon at Box does not stop your merchants selling.
Licensing and the registry. The two services Box operates. If either is unreachable, a running deployment keeps serving merchants; what pauses is installing a new package or standing a new box up.
The shared website render. The one thing Box operates that sits in a customer’s path. Merchant shopfronts are served by it, so it is the surface an availability commitment has to cover.
Your engine, your till, your uptime. The counter keeps selling through an outage of any kind, including ours, because Retail Rails queues offline and reconciles when it reconnects.
Contractual availability targets are set per deployment at the Enterprise tier. Ask for them during an evaluation and you will get the figure operations is held to rather than the figure marketing prefers.
