Moving to the Next Step: the Shipping Payments
over 1 year ago
– Mon, Sep 19, 2022 at 05:57:25 AM
We have finally finished putting the shipping rates on BackerKit! On Monday at 9:30 AM Pacific time BackerKit will begin sending out notifications that will ask you to confirm (or correct) your address if you ordered a physical copy of the book. Physical backers who haven't put in their payment information can check the shipping rates (short answer: they ended up being reasonable) and add the payment information. Cards will begin being charged on the following Monday, at which point there's a good chance that the books will also have arrived from the printer. The last we heard, the September 19 completion estimate still stood, and the printer is in the same state as the warehouse. That's the main information -- the rest of the update is detail and commentary for those who are interested.
-- Details and Comments --
The erroneous shipping charge added to digital backers last week has been removed. We apologize for that; it was because a shipping charge put into the system was applied to all pledge levels, not just the shippable ones.
International Shipping: International backers in the UK and EU (and also Switzerland and Norway) will likely be pleased with the shipping rates. In general, it looks like the strategy of shipping to a UK warehouse for distribution has worked to reduce the "straight from the USA" rate by 40% to 50% or so, although there's a lot of variation by country. We plan to use this again in our next Kickstarter, and we will see if we can expand it to other regions such as Australia/NZ, where rates are high. We are charging backers VAT only in the UK/EU/CH/NO region. Outside the EU/UK, VAT will be charged at the back end of the shipping process.
USA Backers: The rates are media mail, so they are very inexpensive relative to any other shipping method. We are not putting in an option to choose a more expensive but faster/trackable shipping method because the system can't input shipping rates when using the "Charge Shipping Later" feature. Next time we will probably be able to offer that option (see next paragraph).
The "Charge Shipping Later" Beta Program: Although this program could work well for a very simple Kickstarter, the limitations and hassles probably aren't worth the reduction in risk. If we had to do it over again faced with the war in Ukraine breaking out, we probably would -- but under normal "non-war-and-plague" circumstances I suspect we will just be charging shipping up front when we do our next Kickstarter. The main drawbacks are the automatic charge to the backer's credit card and the inability to import shipping rates into the system. By the way, this isn't a criticism of BackerKit: our reps were great, the underlying program is solid, and we'll probably use BackerKit for our next Kickstarter; we just won't elect to use the "Charge Shipping Later" method unless it has changed those two particular features.
Shipping "Add-ons": these represent different things depending on which country you're in. In the USA and non-EU/UK countries (a $4.50 charge), it's just the fulfillment charge to us from the warehouse, which we decided to charge through rather than add $5 to the cost of the book. As it turns out, it was pretty much a wash, with the backers gaining by only $.50 on the method at the end of the day, $4.50 versus $5, although it does include better packing materials than the warehouse's standard. If you're in the EU/UK (and Switzerland and Norway) the $6 charge is our estimate of a share of the freight shipping from the USA to the UK, plus an estimate of upfront costs at the UK warehouse for intake. As mentioned, this strategy seems to have lowered costs to backers quite a bit.
We'd like to thank all of you for backing the Kickstarter, especially since there was so much international instability while it was under way. It has been a long and complicated road, but we're getting there!
Matt