Postage dues

Shipping. The part of the Kickstarter that’s probably the least awesome to think about. Some Kickstarter newbies don’t think about it at all, and end up deep in the red when all’s said and done because it wasn’t part of their budget estimate. I’m not talking about the shipping of getting the goods to your own door (though I’ve heard of people who didn’t even think about that) — it’s getting the goods from your door to the doors of all your backers.

I knew a few of those folks, and so when we launched our own first Kickstarter I was determined not to end up in the same straits. I wanted to build in some sort of shipping buffer into our goal and our tier rewards. The first problem of course is that it’s really hard to estimate, say, the size and weight of a package, when the products you’ll be sending aren’t even made yet. The second problem is you don’t want to scare people off from pledging by putting too much of the cost on them. The third is you can’t just eat all the cost yourself unless you happen to be wealthy enough to cover it, in which case why are you even doing a Kickstarter?

This is a particularly delicate dance in the case of International backers, because the moment a package has to cross a border you’re looking at quite a price hike, regardless of whether you’re using a courier service or not. In the end we went with the lowest cost option provided by our good old United States Postal Service, which still meant approximately $15 to ship to Canada and $20 to ship elsewhere.

Within the U.S. postage could still get fairly high on occasion, such as the tiers where we had to ship a t-shirt, poster, swag, and a set of our individual comics to someone on the opposite coast. Luckily in the end we didn’t have too many of those to deal with, but even with all my thought and preparation there was one thing that caught me by surprise, and that was meeting our stretch goal.

Don’t get me wrong, it was great to get the support! Our initial goal was $2200 and the stretch was $3700, at which point we promised that anyone who pledged at $30 or higher would get a free set of swag: “Uncle Chuck’s Secret Stash”. A little grab bag of Zombie Ranch stickers, temporary tattoos, buttons, etc. They wouldn’t weigh much or take up much room, and the extra money would be more than enough to get them made. No big deal.

Ah, except then we actually hit the stretch, and I suddenly realized that we now had a bunch of $30 tier backers I couldn’t just use Media Mail to send a book to and be done with it.

Media Mail is a low-cost domestic service the USPS offers for certain mailings like books, so long as no advertisements or other merchandise are present. We’d intentionally constructed the Kickstarter so that only at $25 and up did we have to start worrying about sending people non-digital rewards, and only at $40 and up did we have to start worrying about doing more than sending a book in a nicely padded envelope. Except oops, now we had swag to send.

Thankfully we had a buffer of extra funds to work with for just these unforeseen circumstances. Always, always try to ask for more than you think you’ll need (within reason, of course), because there will always be something you’ll overlook, and now what you thought was extra money is actually money you’ll end up needing to use. Heck, even if by some miracle you do calculate everything correctly down to the last dime, you never know when something’s going to get lost or damaged during shipping and will need to be replaced. We already had a bizarre incident like that where the envelope left our hands stuffed full of book and arrived at its destination slit open and empty.

Anyhow I’m going to save any further commentary until everyone gets their stuff. We sent most of the books a couple weeks ago and most everything else including the International shipments are going out this week. Oh yeah, be sure you budget in stuff like boxes and packing tape. Man have we gone through a lot of packing tape. Phew.

Excuse me while I go say a prayer to Hermes or whomever now. May they find their destinations, and may any postal or customs official who opens them for inspection remember to put the stuff back inside this time.