What's up with international shipping on Kickstarter?!?

[Morrus]

In that case, I'm a little confused, because you did seek out and find cheaper shipping options for your What's O.L.D. is N.E.W. Kickstarter - which was a key deciding factor in my decision to back it.

Like everyone else, I made an (educated) guess as to what the international shipping costs would be a year from now, and like you say, looking at different shipping options does allow for some control in that regard. There's never a guarantee, though (and those shipping costs still weren't exactly low!)

So no, it's not completely random. You can make reasonable guesses, which is why we're able to and have done it. If you couldn't, then KS would be dead in the water, at least for any international shipping.

I know of at least one (major) Kickstarter which lost money on the shipping by guessing wrong. It does happen, and not just to inexperienced people.

 

[delericho]

Like everyone else, I made an (educated) guess as to what the international shipping costs would be a year from now, and like you say, looking at different shipping options does allow for some control in that regard. There's never a guarantee, though (and those shipping costs still weren't exactly low!)

Thanks for the clarification.

 

[Morrus]

Back to the original question, though -- it's shipping things out of the US that costs so much.

You might ask why not do two print runs, one in the US and one outside, so that you don't have to ship out of the US ever? Pretty much every Kickstarter creator thinks of that very early on, opens up a spreadsheet, and finds out that it doesn't (usually) work. The problem is that printing costs are massively dependent upon volume. If you split it into two, the printing costs go up, and the amount can often be by even more than the shipping costs were; that increases the price of the product for everyone. Same with just doing PoD for those customers not in the US - you're reducing the size of the initial print run, thereby increasing the printing costs, and therefore increasing the price of the product for both US and non-US customers. That said, if, after the project is over, you find you have only a teeny tiny number of non-US backers (that doesn't apply to me, sadly) you can probably do that without impacting the major print run much, and the numbers might work out. I didn't get chance to find that out, though - I had a lot of non-US backers.

 

[darrell_uk]

I recall, years ago, in conversations with gaming publishers that as a general estimate 90% of the sales for any product would be in the US. Does this still appear to be the case?

 

[Mechalus]

It's bad, really bad. And we're feeling it.
I almost elected to disallow any shipments outside the US for the Tact-Tiles Kickstarter.
And given the number of accusations I've received that we are ripping people off on shipping, I almost wish I had.

I recall, years ago, in conversations with gaming publishers that as a general estimate 90% of the sales for any product would be in the US. Does this still appear to be the case?

In my experience with Nova Praxis (both the Fate and Savage Worlds versions), it was about 70/30. But transhuman sci-fi in general seems to be a little more popular outside of the US, so that could have been a factor.

In fact, shipping really bit us on the Fate version of Nova Praxis. In a few cases, we actually lost money on a few people. That's why we drastically changed our fulfillment method with the Savage Worlds version. You can read about it on the KS page, but the short and simple of it is that we split the cost into three pieces. The KS paid for Void Star's time and effort. The printing and shipping are paid to DrivethruRPG when the book releases.

I expected to get a lot of complaints about that, but I only ever saw about 3-4. Most people seemed to get it, and it made my life a lot easier.

 

[Morrus]

I recall, years ago, in conversations with gaming publishers that as a general estimate 90% of the sales for any product would be in the US. Does this still appear to be the case?

Not in the case of any of my Kickstarters. 60-70%. I can't speak for anybody else, though.

 

[gamerprinter]

Yeah, Kickstarter has nothing to do with it, everything is the cost of shipping which are all third parties to KS. While I will need to do some international shipping to various contributors to my KS, once I have the hard goods in hand, for most of my other products I am primarily going digital only and selling it thru DrivethruRPG as digital only products - Zip files of map tokens, and PDFs for maps and game supplements. I almost don't want to participate in the creation of hard goods because I want nothing to do with the costs of shipping. Even when I come up with what I deem to be a reasonable price for a given product, once shipping is added, it is no longer reasonable.

 

[GX.Sigma]

Why would it not work to print everything in Canada?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

[DND][/DND]

Why would it not work to print everything in Canada?

I can't answer the question, but I will observe that the Adventures in the East Mark Kickstarter was printed in Canada (and shipped from the US, IIRC).

I don't know if that helped them on international shipping or not. I suspect not, as they probably weren't able to split their print run for international shipping.

 

[Bluenose]

I can't answer the question, but I will observe that the Adventures in the East Mark Kickstarter was printed in Canada (and shipped from the US, IIRC).

I don't know if that helped them on international shipping or not. I suspect not, as they probably weren't able to split their print run for international shipping.

The Guide to Glorantha did something similar, getting the books printed and then shipped to two distribution centres, one in the USA and Pegasus Spiel in Germany for European customers.

Both are currently on route to me, as it happens.