KickstarterForum.org

Hey all,

I've just joined Kickstarter about two days ago, and I've been reading up on it to see how I can make my campaign awesome. Anyway, a question here (actually I had a couple but I've forgotten the others, so here's one):

How do you guys determine the shipping of an item to every single country? I know we can limit our rewards to specific countries, but I don't want to deny anyone the chance to fund just because they live in, say, Serbia. I also don't want to lose money on unanticipated shipping costs for sending them The Thing. How do you guys solve this?

Aha. Here's the other question:

What do you ship your product in? I'm shipping a book, so what I need is going to be rectangular and flat, so nothing special. My question is do you suggest using a vinyl bubble wrap, or is paper stock ok? I know vinyl wrap will protect it more than paper stock, but it's also $1.50 more expensive per envelope, and I don't want to charge too much if a paper stock envelope will be sufficient. Any thoughts/suggestions?

I'm interested in this question too. Even though my campaign is live, I'm shakey on shipping. I built in a large "bubble" for shipping so that I'll either make a little extra profit or not. That way I'm sure not to lose money on shipping. I've heard horror stories.

I also chose to only ship US/CAN/EU.

Kickstarter shipping option is not very configurable.

This is what project creators typically do:
1. Charge an inflated amount for shipping, i.e. the highest rate of all the destinations you'll ship to. Works ok if you only ship in the your own country/region, and if your offering is simple - i.e. it's one book, or one box, without a whole lot of optional/extra doodads.

2. Create a pledge level for each zone, with a different shipping rate. i.e. one rate for USA, one rate for Canada, one rate for Europe. This isn't very precise.

3. Have a table on the Kickstarter listing all the shipping to add to the pledge - as backers can "over" pledge for their rewards. We used to do this.

The problem with #2 is that some people forget to pledge for shipping so you'll have to get it from them after the campaign ends anyway - invariably you're going to need something like Backerkit to do this.

4. Collect shipping after the fact through an automated pledge tracking system, This is what we do now, through our own custom site. Not sure if Backerkit can be configured to handle shipping calculations by weight and destination but it can't hurt to ask.