BIG NEWS: The Great Shipping Shake-Up of 2022
almost 2 years ago
– Tue, Jul 19, 2022 at 09:06:51 PM
Happy Monday folks!
After a full week of investigating, tinkering, and quadruple-checking the numbers, the team and I are ready to present our findings regarding the shipping issues that were reported at the BackerKit Pledge Manager's launch, and present our new approach to how we'll be handling these fees.
1. Let's discuss what broke and why.
If there is one painfully true statement about project management, it's that no well-laid plan survives contact with the real world. Almost within the hour of launching the pledge manager, it became apparent that our shipping tables were not functioning as intended and giving some backers excessively high costs, particularly for Canada and the UK.
It turns out that those two regions were defaulting to the "Rest of World" pricing for regions outside of the listed "friendly" shipping areas laid out in the campaign, despite having their own pricing tables.
Additionally, it seemed that some folks who added just an individual mini or two to their cart (not a pledge tier including Faction Starter Boxes) were being given pricing that equated to an Expedition Leader pledge level--excessive for small items that would likely ship in a bubble mailer.
2. Here's what we're doing to address the issues.
After reviewing the software issues and contacting BackerKit and our forwarder for more information, we made some of the necessary adjustments before being presented with an entirely new option on how to handle shipping fees.
It turns out, BackerKit has recently implemented a beta feature that will allow us to collect shipping fees for all backers and late pledgers at the time of delivery. This not only allows us to waive those extra fees at this time to spread out the overall payments for pledges, it also presents an opportunity for us to follow numerous leads on how we optimize fulfillment beyond just using our fulfillment partner.
We think this is great news for a number of reasons, both for backers and BAM:
- No shipping fees due at the time the Pledge Manager / Late Pledge Store closes, spreads out costs to backers
- Gives the BAM Team the time between PM/LPS closing and fulfillment to set up alternatives to traditional fulfillment shipping (more on that under point #3)
- More FLGS's can now join the B.A.S.H. program to create more opportunity for reduced shipping costs throughout regions currently not represented
- There are some hopeful trends in fuel costs right now that will take many months to reflect in the international shipping economy, and there may be more favorable rates in early 2023
3. Here's how we'll use the time between now and fulfillment to try further reducing costs.
In the time leading up to Rivenstone's launch, our team had no idea what kind of reach we might have, or what volume of sales could come as a result of the Kickstarter campaign launch. We had to be as conservative as possible in our planning with all the unknowns at the time, and considering we weren't expecting a massive volume of sales, traditional parcel fulfillment was our main option.
However, in the last week alone since the BackerKit opened, we now have a much clearer view on how many retailers are interested in carrying Rivenstone, and just how much stuff we're going to have to move around the globe and where. We now know we have some new potential avenues for fulfillment that we didn't have the time or resources to vet prior to launch.
Some of the new avenues for easing the costs to ship we now have the opportunity to explore before charging backers include:
- Expanding the B.A.S.H. program to add more options to batch ship orders with the goal to lower shipping fees
- Partnering with drop-shippers in the EU and Asia to reduce costs to EU, UK, AUS/NZ, South Africa
- Exploring some additional options to reduce the size/weight of packaging components used in production
4. If you already filled out your survey or placed a pre-order, here's what's changed for you.
Your shipping charges have automatically been removed from your cart and no further action is required on your part at this time.
5. How you can estimate your parcel shipping fees right now.
We don't want anyone to feel like their costs are mystery now that the shipping fees have been removed from carts. The team and I at BAM are very pro-transparency, so we've decided to just hand over the pricing tables provided to us by our shipping fulfillment partner for you all to look over and assess for yourselves. That way, there's no mystery as to how we calculated those rates.
I've highlighted each line in the table that corresponds to the pledge tiers for quick reference, and even added the Dimensional Weight Calculator we must use for UPS shipments to determine the fee per box.
DOWNLOAD SHIPPING FEE TABLES HERE
Please note that these fees are coming directly from our fulfillment partner, UPS, and USPS. These prices are subject to change (hopefully for the better as fuel prices stabilize/drop.)
I hope you find this change of plans helpful, and I appreciate all of you who waited patiently while we put in the extra hours to make this shift happen. It was a crazy week/weekend!
As always, if you have additional questions or concerns at this time, email us at [email protected] or chat with us on our Discord server.
Thanks again!
✌️ Hanna + The BAM Team