More than ever, people want to be shopping online, friction-free.
I’ve spent a lifetime working on business growth structures; how businesses connect with customers, and how customers want to engage with a company.
I spent years in the world of Amazon and e-commerce, at the crossroads of building relationships and moving products efficiently. Along the way, I learned a few things about e-storefronts, customer portals, user experience, and buyer behavior.
As the co-founder of BoxedUp, it quickly became the leading e-storefront tool for renting portable storage. In 2025, BoxedUp was acquired by Omni~View to create Omni~Store, and provide Omni~View customers with a comprehensive, connected frontend and backend for operators.
At every step, I’ve been part of teams with a single mission: make it effortless for a customer to find what they need, understand exactly what it costs, and buy it in the time it takes to pour a cup of coffee.
That work taught me a simple truth: People don’t just want a product. They want the experience of getting it without friction. When you remove the friction, you don’t just win the sale. You win the relationship.
When I first connected with the portable storage business, I saw an industry full of great operators serving customers who still, too often, have to wait.
Wait for a callback.
Wait for a quote.
Wait to find out what shipping runs to a jobsite two counties over.
Every one of those waits is a crack where a competitor slips in. And every one of them is completely fixable.
Here’s what translates directly from my old world to this one:
Imagine your customer pulls up your site, configures exactly the unit they need, and gets an instant quote with calculated shipping rates baked right in.
No phone tag.
No “let me get back to you.”
Immediate value, delivered the moment they’re ready to get info or, better yet, buy.
Now here’s the part that matters just as much, and that too many people forget:
That same instant quote lands in front of your sales team at the same moment. They see the prospect, the desired options, the numbers. All of it. Immediately.
Better yet, they are empowered to easily move the order forward, reach out to correct a detail and make it the right order, or spot the natural upsell that turns a small rental into a bigger one.
Your customer gets speed.
Your sales team gets intelligence.
Nobody is guessing.
Think about when customers actually make decisions.
Sometimes it’s the contractor standing on the jobsite at 7 a.m. who needs a unit delivered ASAP, sometimes it’s the business owner and/or busy parent doomscrolling from bed at midnight who suddenly remembers they need storage and wants to handle it right now, before the thought slips away.
If your business can only say yes during office hours, you’re not losing to a better competitor; you’re losing to the clock. Give customers the experience they want: Instant quotes and online orders on their schedule, not yours.
The relationship doesn’t end at the sale. Give your customers a portal where they can update their payment information, choose a payment plan that fits their cash flow, pull up their agreements, review order details, and see their invoices, all without picking up the phone.
Every one of those is a task teams used to handle by hand; Every one of those is now a moment of self-serve convenience that builds trust and frees teams to sell.
This is where I’ve landed: the future of portables isn’t only about assets. Of course units need to be portable; that’s the product. But the sales and ordering processes should be portable and agile as well.
Companies that let customers quote, order, pay, and manage their account from a phone in the cab of a truck (or on the sideline of a soccer field) are going to look very different five years from now than the one that still runs everything through a back office.
Put all of it together, and you don’t just keep pace. You become the operator customers remember, recommend, and return to. You become a market differentiator.
I’m genuinely excited to meet more of you and to keep learning about this industry from the people who built it. If any of this resonates, or if you want to push back on it, I’d love to talk and share more about what I learned at Amazon, across e-commerce, and building BoxedUp.
Biagio Sarich leads Relationships and Business Development at Omni~View.
