I wrote about my misfortune with crates, now I worked with them enough to write a proper guide.
Calpheon timber crate is a special trade item created by workers in a building with wood workbench. It needs 5 fir, 5 cedar and 5 birch plywoods with 1 black stone powder. It has no expiry and can be sold to any trade vendor. Due to distance bonus, it worth making it at one end of the map: Trent (one workbench in town, another in the next node) and sell at the other end: Ancado Inner Harbor. If you sell it for over 120%, you get over 140K for a crate:
First thing first: having high contribution points (level alts) is mandatory for this due to the long connection (you can also see some of my work nodes). If you don't want to have high CP, just forget crates.:
Second thing, transportation: you can't offline travel with trade packs. You can't reach Ancado on road with an AFK cart. However you can use the warehouse-transport feature! Send your crates from Trent to Epheria port (790 silver each) and from Epheria to Ancado (4100). Crates don't stack while transportation and you can't transport more than 100. A transport takes 2 hours but only a few clicks to send. So every time you come back from AFK, check the 3 locations and receive what arrived and send what's need to be sent. You can theoretically save 8 CP by skipping Epheria and transport on the Trent - Calpheon - Tarif - Altinova - Ancado Inner Harbor route but that occupies the transport system for 8 hours with 100 crates. And you'll make more. Just use Epheria! In Ancado there should be a permanent alt with a cart (just travel by ship and buy the cart in Valencia). The income should be converted to gold bars and sent to Altinova via warehouse transport.
Third thing, materials: while your worker empire can easily reach 3 birch, 3 fir and 2 cedar nodes (third is a bit expensive), that won't provide you enough materials, just about 30-40 crates worth a day. Having all those nodes and an alt locked just for 30-40 crates is a dumb waste. So you need to buy more wood. Fir and cedar sells around 600, Birch around 300. 8 needed for a plywood and 5 plywoods needed from each. That's 60K material cost. You should check the market often for new listings and buy lots of timber.
Fourth thing, processing: you must process all the timber into plywood. That's lot of processing since 1 plywood takes 20 seconds to make (4 processes of timber make 4*2.5 = 10 planks, 1 process makes 2.5 plywood, 5*10/2.5 = 20). So the plywoods of one crate needs 300 seconds aka 5 minutes of processing. For 200 crates a day, that's 1000 minutes or 17 hours a day processing. Follow the processing guide and if you don't want to process at least 10 hours a day (AFK of course), forget the crates. You can save lot of time by buying planks or plywoods directly when they are cheap enough. Important thing: don't forget the price of processing. Just because you process the timber, it's not free. You could process iron into steel or unsellable timber to plywoods to vendor. For example you can only vendor Ash timber for 70 each (560 for 8), but if you make plywood, you can sell for 2240. That's 1680 silver profit on a plywood that you will not make if you make crates. So for the 15 plywoods per crate you can estimate 25K processing cost. You don't have to process in Trent, you can process anywhere and use an alt to offline travel to Trent with the plywoods.
The material, processing and transport costs are around 90K. So your income is 40-50K per crate. What you have to do for it? Lock down your CP and log to the Ancado alt. He must be online for 10 minutes before using the trader NPC. Traders rarely offer 130% max price. If you or someone else sold crates recently, it's lower. Every % will cost you around 1K. I use to sell over 115%. If it's lower, I switch channels, which is more waiting and no guarantee that there will be better price. Even if you find 130%, after selling 60 crates, it will be below 115, forcing a jump and wait. While jump and wait is AFK, it's not long-time AFK, so you must be around the computer. Also, while your alt is waiting, your main is not processing, and you could make 70K in 10 minutes processing. Sure, you can process with your Ancado alt, but that means sending the materials and sending the products back and leveling processing on that alt. As a middle ground I send her Silver Azalea and she makes concentrated herbal juice and when enough are made, offline travel to Valencia and sell it. Before selling the crates, you must do a successful bargain minigame which is stupid, takes time and energy points!
So think about all these before jumping on crates! But if you do it right, that's another 10M a day with little clicking.