Reward Delivery to Canada Backers

We are currently planning to use USPS First Class International mail for delivering rewards to Canada backers, requiring $11 more than for US backers.

—

Countdown: 52 days. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’re using Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment for shipping rewards to US backers. I expect that to be the majority of our backers, and we’ll plan for the games to head straight from the manufacturer in China to Amazon. However, we cannot use Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment to ship rewards outside of the United States for anything other than “media” items, and board games do not quality as media items. (There’s a good discussion of that over in the comments on this post.) I called the UPS Store and asked what it would cost to ship my Carcassonne box to Canada; she estimated that going UPS Ground it would cost about $30 depending on the zip code. She told me it would be cheaper to ship it First Class mail through the post office, so I came back home and ran some estimates on Stamps.com. I entered the following dimensions: 12″ x 9″ x 3″, 2 lbs 0 oz: First Class Mail to Canada was $14.54: I tried a number of different dimensions, but none of them seemed to affect the price except the weight. I also tried a number of different Canada addresses (I have Chris’s address in Toronto, plus multiple Canada addresses from Relic Expedition backers in various provinces)  and that didn’t seem to matter either. Changing the weight, it looked like a package to Canada would cost something like $4.46 + $5.04/lb:

• 1 pound – $9.50
• 2 pounds – $14.54
• 3 pounds – $19.58

(Changing the number of ounces, I think weights are rounded up to the nearest quarter of a pound. If a copy of Lanterns could stay under 1 pound 12 ounces, it would only cost $13.28. But I think planning on two pounds is the better approach. Look back at the post on US backers to see how I came up with the weight.) Shipping First Class, I have to buy a box. I looked over at ULine.com, and it looks like I could get 100 of their S341 boxes for $74.00; if I need all 100 boxes, that’s only 74 cents a box. I’ll plan for 50 Canada backers and assume $1.48/backer for the box. (For Relic Expedition, we had 23 backers in Canada. If we only get that many for Lanterns, we can probably find boxes that we can order in smaller quantities and hopefully stay close to $1.50/box.) Shipping First Class assumes I’ll have all the games in my possession so that I can box them up and mail them to Canada. However, I won’t actually see all the games: they will go straight to Amazon. So I’ll first have to pay to ship them from Amazon to me. According to Chris Henderson, they charge 50 cents/game for a bulk shipment. If I do have Amazon ship the games to me so that I can then manually ship them to Canada, I’ll have to be sure to leave some extra time for the Canada rewards. (Depending on the volume and our choice of manufacturer, there could be a couple of other options. For example, if we have hundreds of backers in Canada, it might make sense to ship a patch from China directly to someone in Canada to fulfill those. I think it makes sense to it as if we’ll get 50-100 backers in Canada, planning to do First Class mail from my house to backers in Canada, and then modify the plan if we can find something less expensive based on our volume.) So far, that’s $14.54 + $1.48 + $.50 = $16.52 for each backer. Don’t forget that Kickstarter and Amazon take 10% of every dollar pledged, even dollars pledged for shipping, so in reality $18.33 of each Canada backer’s pledge will go to shipping. For US backers, shipping would cost me $6.40, which means (factoring Kickstarter+Amazon fees) that $7.11 of each US backer’s pledge would go towards shipping. Comparing that to Canada, it will cost me $11.22 more to ship one game to a backer in Canada than to ship one game to a backer in the United States. I updated the reward tiers to reflect that the Canada pledge level will be $11 higher than the US level and that $18 of it will go towards shipping.