Kickstarter live case study. Step 7: fulfilment & shipping

Once you’ve come up with an idea, found an audience, raised the money, and made the product, you need to ship it to people.

This is also the case for digital products, but for now I’ll focus on shipping physical products.

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Frankly, shipping often feels like a frustrating task. It’s not fun or creative, or particularly satisfying in itself, but it needs to be done.

Shipping your products is the final step in a long process and it is very rewarding once you start to hear from happy customers at the end of it.

Warehouse or yourhouse

What shipping looks like will vary a lot depending on the type of product you’ve made and the scale of your project.

At one end of the spectrum you might be making a small number of products in a relatively handmade way. Think for example about craftspeople selling their creations on Etsy. In this case you may well just buy some cardboard shipping boxes and pack everything yourself before taking it down to your local post office.

As you scale up, that becomes less practical, and then eventually impossible.

Once you’re shipping hundreds or thousands of your products you really need to get some help with shipping. In my experience this normally means getting my products shipped directly from a factory to a 3PL (third party logistics) company

Again, depending on what your product is, this might not be possible. Your product might need some final assembly of parts from different manufacturers and suppliers. So you’ll either have to do this yourself or pay someone to do it for you. Then you may ship in bulk from there to a 3PL company to do the final shipping to your backers/customers.

Even with fairly simply products, the logistics of your supply chain can quickly get quite complex. All extra steps in the process add to your lead times too.

Kickstarter fulfilment

When running a Kickstarter project you have to think about what shipping to your backers is going to cost. Within the platform you have options to set up different shipping costs for sending your rewards to different regions. This cost is then passed onto backers.

As you do this, you can decide where you do and where you don’t want to ship to, and set shipping cost for different regions/countries.

When backers select rewards from your project they will then be shown shipping costs based on the country they live in.

Once your campaign ends you’ll need to send out ‘reward surveys’ to your backers. This is where you ask for shipping addresses. You also have the option to ask additional questions if necessary - for example backers might have a choice of colour that they need to make for certain rewards.

After backers have responded to your survey you’ll be able to download your ‘backer report’ which gives you everything you need in order to fulfil the rewards.

You might be surprised how many backers fail to respond to your shipping survey so you may well have to chase people several times!

Global logistics

One question I get asked a lot by Kickstarter creators is whether or not they should ship globally or if they can just ship to backers in their own country. That can seem like a daunting task and it’s a good question.

The answer largely depends on where the creator is based and what type of project they’re running.

If you’re based in the US you might get away with only offering shipping to US customers in order to simplify your logistics. Otherwise, by not offering shipping more widely you could be seriously reducing your chances of success.

Ultimately, it’s a question of how big your niche is and how many backers you need in order to reach your target. If you think there are plenty of potential backers in your home market then you could limit your shipping countries and be OK, but if not, you might need to open up shipping to more countries.

I specifically mentioned being in the US because the US seems to be by far the biggest market for Kickstarter. Even for me based in the UK, over half of my backers typically come from the US. If I only offered shipping to the UK it would make my life way easier, but I’d be leaving a lot of money on the table.

`Backers by geography for one of my Kickstarter campaigns`
Another thing you might have to consider is how easy it is to offer shipping to multiple countries based on your specific product. For example, products containing batteries or liquids might be more complicated to ship to some countries. Also if you have a particularly bulky product you need to be extra careful to get your estimated costs right.
Taxes and duties also need to be considered. Sadly I’ve had plenty of disappointed European backers facing surprise charges since Brexit.

Third-party pledge management tools

There’s another complicating factor when it comes to setting up shipping options and that’s the use of third-party ‘pledge managers’.

What they are?

There are companies outside of Kickstarter offering tools that give you extra features beyond what’s available natively in Kickstarter.

Examples are BackerKit and PledgeManager.

How they work?

These tools integrate with Kickstarter so that instead of using the backer report spreadsheet downloaded from Kickstarter, they give you a slightly more slick front end where you can see all your backers’ data and manage the fulfilment of their rewards.

One thing these tools allow you to do is to charge no shipping costs during your Kickstarter campaign, but instead charge people shipping later when they fill in their shipping details.

This might be useful if you’re not sure what your shipping costs will be, and you can make sure you set the right price nearer to the time you’ll actually be shipping. Frankly, I think that’s a bit lazy and disingenuous, but quite a few Kickstarter creators seem to do it.

In addition to just collecting shipping details, a key differentiator with these types of tools is that they offer you the chance to take late pledges once your Kickstarter campaign ends, and also up-sell and cross-sell to your original backers. (Although as of writing, Kickstarter itself is rolling out late pledges as a feature.)

Typically, these pledge managers make their money by taking a cut on any extra sales they generate, much the same way Kickstarter take a cut of your original funding.

Should you use one?

If you have a relatively straightforward product with not many variations or shipping options, there’s really no need to use a third-party pledge manager. The built-in Kickstarter tools are perfectly fine and make things much simpler for your backers. As a backer I find it quite annoying having to use a pledge manager, especially when it comes with extra shipping costs that I either didn’t notice originally or, more likely, forgot about.

I did however use one with my latest project. I did that because I added a different variant of my product after hitting a stretch goal. The pledge manager let my backers make a choice of variant which I couldn’t really have done using the Kickstarter tools alone.

I also took advantage of the cross-selling feature and added an additional 10% in revenue compared to my original Kickstarter funding total.

Although I used a separate pledge manager tool, I still charged shipping upfront during the Kickstarter campaign. This meant that most backers could just click through and add their shipping details with nothing extra to pay. They would only need to pay anything if they chose at that point to add on extra rewards to their original choice. That way I could still get the advantage of up-selling but didn’t piss backers off with surprise shipping costs.

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For me, shipping is probably the least interesting part of running a Kickstarter project, but it needs to be done.

Shipping costs can easily end up being a quarter of your funding total, so you need to fully understand it.

It’s also something that’s worth thinking about way earlier than you might expect. For my first Kickstarter I built shipping considerations into the initial product design process. In that case, I made sure my product fitted in packaging with a thickness within the 25 mm 'large letter' threshold for Royal Mail. I obviously wouldn’t have done that to the detriment of core product functionality, but since I was able to, those few millimetres have made a massive cumulative saving in shipping costs over the lifetime of the product.

With everything you do on Kickstarter you should make sure you’re open and transparent with backers. This is particularly true with shipping arrangements and costs. Backers need to know what to expect and don’t want any surprises once the campaign ends. If you’re clear and honest about your shipping right from the start your backers will thank you. And after you get fewer support queries and more happy customers, you’ll be thanking yourself too.