You’ve exceeded your funding goal, run a successful Kickstarter campaign, and have decided to set up a pre-order store or late-pledge page. Now what?

Pre-orders are an integral part of BackerKit’s offering to project creators, but as BackerKit Product Manager Dan Goldenberg notes, project creators “often forget to promote them” once their project is live in BackerKit. “It’s not as if once you build a pre-order store, people will just show up,” he says.

While some Kickstarter projects are able to harness their brand power to drive sales, most won’t have that luxury. Goldenberg says it only takes a little effort to reap large rewards. “We’ve found the people who perform the best in terms of pre-order sales really get a lot of people visiting it.”

The most effective methods included embedding BackerKit’s pre-order store widget on personal websites, running Facebook ad campaigns, and sending out targeted email campaigns.

Feeling overwhelmed? Here are simple steps you can take to make your pre-order store a success.

Before you launch your Kickstarter campaign, set up your pre-order store page

You’ll want your pre-order store to be ready right as you end your campaign so you can continue to collect the information of people who are interested in what you’re offering and connect with those “late backers.”

When you set up your pre-order store, make sure that all your items are clearly named and accompanied by high-quality images and accurate descriptions.

BackerKit’s image gallery lets you upload multiple images for each item, which lets you display an item from multiple angles or highlight all variations of an item to make it easier for backers to make their selections.

This helps to make your products as appealing as possible to backers.

Our help center has more information on how to set up pre-orders.

Pick your items

Ideally, your pre-order store should offer items that are enticing for both your earliest supporters as well as latecomers to your campaign.

Project creators can differentiate between Kickstarter pre-order backers and original backers by offering slightly different pricing for pre-order rewards, or shipping those pre-order rewards only after the original backer rewards have shipped.

This approach allows you to give your most fervent backers preferential treatment while keeping your project open to the crowdfunding community.

Kickstarter creators should customize their pre-order store to fit branding

Branding is a powerful promotional tool — it tells people who you are. To help tell your story, your BackerKit pre-order store can be personalized to accurately reflect your brand. Kickstarter creators can personalize a pre-order store by customizing the project title, logo, color scheme, and call-to-action buttons to their specifications.  

Include Kickstarter FAQs in your pre-order store

Shipping fees, products specifications, taxes, and other information included in your Kickstarter FAQ should be added to your pre-order store. This will save you from having to field these questions multiple times.

Link your pre-order store

Post the link on Kickstarter Spotlight, your website, social media, forum and communities you are on, and embed it on your home page. Share it often!

After you’ve launched

Gather email addresses

Kickstarter backers will often browse a pre-order store but may not make a purchase straight away. Sometimes, they might require more information about the product.

To solve this problem, we’ve introduced the ability for creators to collect email addresses from customers using our mailing list tool.

The mailing list feature has an opt-in form that allows project creators to collect email addresses from prospective customers.

Project creators can use their mailing list to highlight special offers. You could do this by splitting your list into two sets of people: folks who pledged, and folks who didn’t.

Send marketing emails

Stuck for ideas on how to write a great marketing email? It’s easy as ABC.

A. Send messages to your existing Kickstarter backers, telling them their friends can pre-order your product here. Make sure to include a link to your store

B. Send messages to people on your list who didn’t back your project. You can do this by using BackerKit’s coupon codes to offer an exclusive discount.

C. Promote any new accessories, options or colorways through an email campaign.

Make sure to highlight specific products that are available for sale and consider including a promotion, such as a limited-time discount, to increase the sense of urgency. You can do this through coupon codes, which we’ll talk about later.

If the email has a prominent call-to-action – a ‘ Buy Now’ button, for instance – it will ensure customers have an easy way to visit your store.

Once you’ve split your mailing list, it’s time to start crafting your message. To folks who pledged, be sure to thank them for pledging to your campaign, and tell them they can forward this email to a friend to give them a discount off your product. You should also include a quick reminder that they should not place a pre-order until they’ve received their post-campaign survey. Doing this prevents duplicate orders. 

To folks who didn’t pledge, we recommend writing a message that will spur them into taking action. Letting them know that this is the final chance to receive a discount on your product creates a sense of exclusivity and scarcity and increases the likelihood that they will convert into sales.

Use coupon codes

Coupon codes can be used to entice new customers with discounts, offload inventory, and reward repeat customers. They’re an easy, useful e-commerce tool.

For project creators, they can be a simple, effective way to compel backers to buy their products by giving them an attractive discount.

“We know that one of the big Kickstarter tropes is providing a discount off retail, and we want to keep that going forward,” Goldenberg says.

Coupon codes give project creators the ability to provide flat-price discounts off add-ons and pre-order items, and are easily tracked.

Project creators can create individual codes for different mediums: one for promotions on a podcast, and another for an email marketing campaign. (If you’d like to learn more, this explains how coupon codes work in more detail.)

Fun things you can do with coupon codes: celebrate survey day with a $5 discount off add-ons, run promotions for your pre-order store through email and other marketing channels, give repeat customers a special offer.

Continue to market your product

Marketing your product doesn’t end once your campaign does.

Is holiday season approaching? Consider offering customers a discount with BackerKit’s coupon codes, and make sure you email them to let them know. If you’re making an appearance at an event or conference, an email can help spread the word.

Notifying your customers of new product milestones or project updates is a great way to keep them engaged in your campaign.

Some of the most successful pre-order store campaigns on BackerKit include Formbox, which embedded BackerKit’s pre-order widget on its website and ran paid ads directing visitors to the site, helping it amass $192,256 in pre-order sales, and Friday the 13th, which made $1.37 million in pre-order sales on BackerKit – more money than it had made in its initial crowdfunding campaign.

The lesson? Marketing your pre-order store is an ongoing effort. The more you hustle, the more likely you are to reap big rewards. Even a little bit of promotion can go a long way in raising awareness of your pre-order offerings.

Many creators have enjoyed success running Facebook ad campaigns to increase the visibility of their pre-order store. Although if you choose this option, you must have a strong audience targeting to achieve a lower cost per acquisition, as well as higher click-through rates and conversion rates.

You can learn more about marketing strategies for Kickstarter campaign pre-order stores here. Creators planning to launch Kickstarter campaigns soon can reach out to us with any questions by clicking the link below.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in 2017. It has been updated for relevance and accuracy.

The post Kickstarter Pre-Order Store Success: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

BackerKit add-on items are extra rewards that backers can purchase via their survey in addition to the items they receive for their pledge. It’s a great way to generate extra revenue for your crowdfunding campaign. 

On average, creators raise an additional 22% of their initial pledge amount in BackerKit, and add-ons are a huge part of that. 

We did a deep-dive on the top 15 add-on performers of last quarter, and we want to share those insights with you! 

Some of these results were expected and can be reviewed in our previous Add-On best practices article here. In the last three months of 2019, 100% of the top selling add-on projects used add-on descriptions, 93% used professional-grade images, and 80% used our “Categories” feature to break out their add-ons into different groups. These numbers were congruent with our previous observations, but we also noticed a few new trending surprises. 

Creator’s Choice

80% of creators used our “Creator’s Choice” tag to call out their personal favorite items. These items performed better overall, generally outselling similarly priced add-ons without the tag. Our advice is to use them selectively, however, and only highlight those items you’re truly excited about. Authenticity is important!

Retail Prices

73% of the top performing add-on projects used special backer-only pricing. Your Kickstarter backers are your biggest fans, and if they know they’re getting an exclusive good deal in the BackerKit survey, creators have a better chance of converting sales.

Run a Special Promotion during your Kickstarter campaign

This was my personal favorite surprise while researching add-on all stars. Four out of five of the top add-on performers (who raised an additional 48-76% of their campaign total in BackerKit) ran add-on promotions during their campaigns. 

One particular example that stands out is Dwellings of Everdale who asked backers to solve a riddle in order to receive a coupon for a free $9.99 add-on in BackerKit. Here’s their description:Other promotions included a single free add-on for backers who backed at $X or more on Kickstarter, encouraging backers to over-pledge on Kickstarter to access limited add-on pricing, and including add-on specific stretch goals in the campaign. 

Post an update about your add-ons

73% of the projects we looked at posted an update on Kickstarter about their add-ons. It might sound obvious, but your backers are excited about the extra goodies that will be available post-campaign. A good time to do this is right before surveys go out, or right before you decide to lock down orders. 

Send a final lock down notice to your backers

BackerKit has a brand new feature where creators can send a “final notice” to their backers via BackerKit letting them know it’s their last chance to add add-ons or make any changes to their orders. Only 50% of our top-sellers used this feature, but it seems like the upside is worth the extra click! 

If you have any questions about add-on optimization, reach out to hello@backerkit.com. We’d love to point you in the right direction!

The post Best Practices: BackerKit Survey Add-on Items appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Visualizing the lifecycle of a crowdfunding campaign can prove difficult for first-time creators. This is particularly the case for the post-campaign phase, which encompasses the window between reaching your funding goal and the delivery of your rewards to backers.

If you’ve little experience at hand, it can be hard to set and manage expectations, especially with so many variables at play. That said, there are some general guidelines to make this process easier to define.

Determinants of your project timeline will be your ability to swiftly gather accurate item counts from your backers, the time it takes your manufacturer to produce all of your rewards, as well as the time it takes to package and ship your rewards to your backers.

As a general rule, it’s wise to allocate more time than you need. This means setting deadlines that incorporate a sizeable buffer against unexpected production delays, manufacturing mishaps, or unforeseen hitches in fulfilment.

In this post, we’ll delve into the post-campaign stages and what they might look like for your campaign.

Sending out Surveys

BackerKit recommends sending out surveys 14 days after your campaign has ended. On average, 70% to 75% of surveys in BackerKit are filled out within the first three to five days. But that’s no reason for complacency – your work’s not over yet.

Success manager Anna Walsemann says that higher completion rates are driven by creator communication.

“The more communicative the creators are – the more they post on their campaign page about their timeline and so on – the stronger the conversion is for surveys.”

Charging Cards

“Figuring out the timelines for delivering and asking people to fill out their surveys is important,” Weiser says. “You don’t want to ask people to fill out their surveys too early because people move, you send it to the wrong address.” Figuring out the right time can minimize chargebacks: this time around, Weiser only received two send-backs.

BackerKit’s Head of Support, Michael Kent, says that the timeline for charging cards and locking down can vary immensely. He’s seen project creators charge within a week of 80% survey completion; some project creators have even charged orders while surveys are progressively being completed. In more extreme cases, some have even charged a few times a day while surveys are being sent out.

Kent cautions against this last approach. “That’s not something we recommend, because once your lock and charge, the backer can’t change anything but their shipping address,” he says.

‘That complicates things as far as the support flow goes because once a backer is charged, they can’t make any changes without writing us an email. Making that change entails a refund in order to unlock the order and change it.”

The ‘happy path’, as far as backers are concerned, involves giving your supporters enough time and flexibility to update their orders. This means holding off and waiting to charge cards once you’re ready to fulfil your campaign rewards.

“Some creators need to charge cards immediately for pre-orders and add-ons in order to ramp up production,” he says. “Others with a more robust production plan will want to start manufacturing production for far more orders than they’ve received in crowdfunding. They can usually hold off and wait to charge cards closer to when they’re fulfilling items. He says this tends to result in a “happier backer flow”.

This option is a best practice recommendation, but Kent notes it requires creators to “have enough funds available to get to production and manufacturing for all of your original campaign rewards and add-ons, which can be difficult”.

Another source of support tickets occurs when creators charge cards. It’s inevitable, but not an insurmountable obstacle: Kent says queries can be kept at bay by keeping your backers informed of your project timeline. 

“You need to make it really unmistakably clear to your backers that you will be charging them on a specific date,” Kent says. “Sometimes, if a backer is blindsided by a charge, or if they assume that the money was taken during the survey, it could cause financial issues for them.”

“That’s never a position you want to put your supporters in, so definitely post an update or two updates leading up to your charge date to make it clear that they will be charged then.”

Locking Down

A project’s lockdown date will largely be determined by your fulfilment partner and whether your project relies on specific counts for manufacture.

For instance, if a project needs to ramp up production based on direct counts, Kent notes a lockdown date should be set relatively soon so that as many backers can fill out the survey as soon as possible, allowing counts to be calculated with the most accuracy.

On the other hand, if a project doesn’t depend on direct counts – these might include project creators who plan a pre-order store or Indiegogo InDemand campaign as well – the timeline differs. “If they’re expecting to have ongoing orders and manufacturing, they’ll probably just put in a huge order with their manufacturer, and therefore don’t need to worry about counts,” Kent says.

“In that situation, it’s best to set your lockdown date much later – you might not even lock orders until you are ready to ship. That’s a better flow for backers support-wise, because they’re able to make any changes they want, and that doesn’t matter to the creator because they’re overproducing everything in anticipation of more orders in the future.”

Handling Unforeseen Hurdles

Mark Weiser, creator of the PON push pin, said he endured delays in production that were unexpected.

“I encountered some issues after the Kickstarter campaign,” he says. “The company I was going to work with flaked on me, they weren’t able to do what they said they would, so I had to scramble. My project ended up being delayed by 6-8 months because of that, and I had to go overseas instead.” This meant that the timeline for delivering his campaign blew out significantly.

For his first campaign, Weiser noted that there was too much complexity in terms of the rewards offered to backers. But he learned from the experience the second time round, electing to radically simplify his campaign.

Generally speaking, when delays occur and are announced through project updates, creators can expect a spike in the volume of support tickets. When in doubt, transparency is the best policy – better to let backers know that a delay is forthcoming, rather than keep them in the dark.

Shipping

The scale and complexity of your project will determine the time it takes to ship your rewards to your backers.

“Usually, if you’re either working with a fulfilment center or by yourself, you’ll need to separate your backers into similar package groups and ship based on those groups of similar items,” Kent says. 

He notes that shipping times will also hinge on your project’s manufacturing timetable.

“A lot of the time, project creators want to ship immediately. The first items to come off the manufacturing line that pass quality assurance are often the first ones to start shipping. That might be a deciding factor in your packaging groups,” he says.

“That might create a snafu if you’ve got another item in the same order that is not manufactured yet.  Some project creators might choose partial fulfillment in this scenario; others might wait until everything has come off the line.”

The post From Surveyed to Shipped: The BackerKit Project Lifecycle appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

The reward fulfillment process is a crucial part of any crowdfunding campaign. This stage is fraught with potential obstacles, delays, and unexpected costs – and not to mention anxious backers.

Figuring out the finer points of manufacturing, storing, and shipping your goods can be time-consuming. As a project creator, it’s important to consider the complexity of your campaign – the rewards structure, the number and geographical location of backers when calculating your fulfillment workload.

Should You DIY or Use a Fulfillment Center?

The first decision project creators must make is whether they will partner with a fulfillment center or go it alone. If you’re choosing to outsource fulfillment, many project creators typically combine online research with sales calls and possibly site visits with warehouses or fulfillment centers to ensure there is a system in place to keep on top of inventory.

Thomas Sleeth, BackerKit’s customer success manager, says a project creator’s fulfillment workload is ultimately determined by a campaign’s backer count and the type of product you need to manufacture. As a general rule, a campaign with thousands of backers or a more and a cumbersome reward might be more easily conquered with the help of a fulfillment center.

“The pros are that someone else does the fulfillment for you, they’re professionals, and hopefully less error-prone,” Sleeth says.

On the downside, it’s a hefty expense,  you have less control over your product, you have less insight into the status of individual orders, and fulfillment centers are optimized towards ongoing sales rather than shipping everything out in a single wave.

“Many fulfillment centers charge a ‘pick and pack’ rate, which means you have to pay for each item that is getting moved around,” Sleeth says.

“If you have a bunch of different items and not a lot of backers, even though it’s complex to keep track of it at your end, it would be very expensive to do with a shipping partner.”

He reminds project creators to bear in mind the time and labor associated with doing it yourself, as well as the hidden costs (printing, packaging, return to sender). For project creators with less than 2,500 orders, he recommends BackerKit Postage, which lets project creators purchase and print shipping labels within BackerKit.

If you decide to work with a fulfillment center, Peter Imai, head of growth at Whiplash, recommends project creators “have an idea of your product roster”. This means being across how many items in each reward, whether any assembly is required post-production and pre-delivery. “The more you know about your rewards roster, the better idea you’ll have in terms of actual cost of fulfillment,” Imai says.

Predicting Your Production Capacity

Chris Muscarella, the creator of the Field Skillet, says that production forecasting can be challenging for fledgling businesses. “When you’re a very young business, your ability to have precision around production forecasting is still a work in progress,” he says. “People expect to buy something online and have it show up in a few days.”

Crowdfunding campaigns require more patience – from backers and project creators alike. Contributing to a campaign is not like shopping on Amazon where products are already manufactured, packaged, and sitting in a warehouse ready to be shipped. Determining your production capacity can be difficult, particularly if you’re planning to offer pre-orders and add-ons.

The campaign for the Field Skillet was, in some ways, a victim of its own success: it raised a total of $1.6 million on Kickstarter, far exceeding its modest goal of $30,000.  “It created the problem of creating months of work to fulfill all our pledges”. That meant that we didn’t want to try and immediately double the amount of back orders.”

Muscarella says it’s important to set and manage expectations before and during the fulfillment phase. “We decided to lean into scarcity until we had a better handle on our production capacity,” he says. Muscarella did this by creating a waiting list so that people could line up for more product availability. “They were able to bump up the line if they shared the link with friends and that resulted in an extra ~5% or so of list growth,” he says.

Five months after the campaign ended, the Field Skillet began shipping its first batch of products to backers. The company then decided to release a second product – a larger-sized cast iron skillet – as an add-on option for existing backers.

The Field Skillet was delivered to backers in waves over time, rather than all in one shipment. “We knew we were going to have limited production capacity and it gave us a way of managing expectations,” he says. “It also gave us a way to control inventory during our campaign and cut the rewards short when needed. Theoretically, this was a great idea.”

But in practice, he says, tiered delivery schedules are difficult to manage, and considered uncommon practice by fulfillment centers. Some 3PL shipping providers and software tools weren’t equipped to deal with the request, and it made the fulfillment cycle longer than normal. This is something to bear in mind if you’re working with a 3PL.

Common Mistakes

Many project creators will have never subjected their product prototype to large-scale production prior to their crowdfunding campaign. They can build one perfectly but figuring out how to build a hundred at a time can be a challenge. Sometimes, scaling up manufacturing can be difficult, and might result in higher costs than your initial estimates.

If creators underestimate the number of backers they get for their campaign, they must expand their initial production run. This might cause supply chain issues, resulting in production delays. To manage expectations, it’s important to set delivery timeframes that account for these delays and keep backers up to date with project updates.

Sleeth says that prematurely optimizing for fulfillment can be a costly mistake. He cites the example of a smaller project in the UK with about 500 backers that were looking to set up a fulfillment center in Australia, despite having a small number of backers there.  “It’s important to get a sense of the scale of the problem before you try and solve it,” he says.

In a blog post on Medium, Triggertrap Ada creator Haje Jan Kamps explains how one mistake in the production process can have disastrous flow-on effects for your campaign. He writes that picking the wrong software supplier resulted in problems affecting production, problems with battery life, source control, code quality, documentation, and cost.

Kamps stresses the importance of communications at all times – with manufacturers, other team members, and most importantly, backers. 

“Kickstarter backers understand that there are delays from time to time, and they want to be part of the journey through the minefield that is product development. Keeping our backers informed goes a long way towards having a good sense of understanding.”

“If it hadn’t been for our Kickstarter backers, perhaps we would have struggled on behind the scenes. That simply isn’t an option: We’re late. We’re embarrassed. And now we feel duty bound to air our laundry in public because ultimately, we’ve failed to live up to some of our backers’ expectations,” he writes.

The post How to Manage Your Fulfillment Workload appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Which pre-order platform is right for you? As a project creator, your decision will be influenced by a number of factors such as the setup of your campaign, your crowdfunding platform, possibilities for software integration, platform fees, as well as personal preferences for customization, layout and design. You should also consider whether your chosen pre-order platform is easy to set up, and can be integrated with other apps.

BackerKit, Shopify, and Indiegogo InDemand are three popular avenues for selling pre-orders, each with its own set of unique strengths. Read on to find out which one is right for your project.

BackerKit

BackerKit’s hosted pre-order stores are specifically designed for crowdfunding campaign creators. Creators that use BackerKit to survey backers and sell add-ons can easily enable a hosted pre-order store. It lets project creators sell pre-orders as soon as their campaign ends with minimal setup hassle.

Another major benefit besides ease of setup is that creators can use BackerKit to process all pre-order backers at the same time as their campaign backers.

Creators can host their stores directly on BackerKit or embed a pre-order widget directly onto a product website to sell directly to customers. Other features include coupon code support, Stripe and PayPal payment integration for credit card purchases, and flexible shipping fee options that allow project creators to set free shipping, flat-rate shipping, or custom shipping fees based on location.

David Robert, creator of the MSK-1 Knife, used BackerKit to host pre-orders once his campaign on Kickstarter ended. His campaign on BackerKit raised $173,261, nearly the same amount as his original Kickstarter campaign. “Doing a direct link from Kickstarter over to our pre-order page was so seamless,” Robert says. “I have people who have pre-ordered who didn’t even realize they’d been transferred to a different platform.”

He says that using BackerKit as a platform for pre-orders suited the needs of his project, which had a particularly complex reward structure.

“BackerKit does such a job of taking multiple SKUs and combining them into packages. That gave me the flexibility to offer so many different packages, and that’s fairly hard to pull off on some of the other online store applications.”

Some project creators have raised more in BackerKit pre-order sales than their original campaign. The creators of Friday the 13th, a multiplayer video game, raised $823,704 from 12,218 backers on Kickstarter, exceeding their funding goal by about $100,000. In BackerKit, they amassed $1.36 million from pre-order sales in BackerKit alone.  

Meanwhile, the runScribe raised $257, 294 in its Kickstarter campaign and $18,814 in BackerKit pre-order sales.

BackerKit offers three plans for project creators. Pre-orders are included in all pricing plans.

Shopify

Shopify is a popular ecommerce platform that can be integrated with your Kickstarter campaign as well as BackerKit. Shopify isn’t tailor-made for crowdfunding campaigns, but it has many features that will appeal to project creators that need to have an ecommerce store for ongoing business. Many creators will launch a Shopify store after shipping out campaign rewards and BackerKit pre-orders.

Rockwell Razors’ founder Gareth Everard used Shopify after orders for the Rockwell 6S campaign had been shipped with BackerKit. It seemed a strong fit for his plans to shift Rockwell Razors from the pre-order phase to a permanent e-commerce store.

“We sold out the entire first production round,” he said. “We already finished our orders in BackerKit and wanted to move towards being a regular e-commerce store.” Everard says one of the most appealing features of Shopify is that you can set up a store with the domain name of your choice.

“This was the point where we moved to rockwellrazors.com as our URL on our Shopify store, just to make it a more cohesive experience for customers.” He also cited the strength of its support infrastructure, its ease of use, its built-in analytics software, and its integration with a large app ecosystem as key strengths.

Shopify has three pricing plans ranging from $29/month to $299/month.

Indiegogo InDemand

Indiegogo’s InDemand allows project creators to raise funds after their initial crowdfunding campaign has concluded. It can be used by project creators regardless of what platform they used for their crowdfunding campaign.

Arthur Maitre, digital manager at Native Union, says “there was still quite a bit of interest” for the products in the hours and days after the Kickstarter campaign for the ECLIPSE cable had ended. The Native Union website saw a huge spike in traffic in the last two hours of the campaign, and received many emails from people who had missed out on contributing while the Kickstarter was still live.

“We needed a platform for people to be able to pre-order the ECLIPSE so they’re the second group of people to get it after the Kickstarter backers and before the product goes to market,” Maitre says. So, the company chose to use Indiegogo’s InDemand, which allows project creators to raise money for an indefinite period once a crowdfunding campaign has run its course.

The amount of money raised through pre-order sales on InDemand varies across projects. The campaign for the EcoQube C raised $375,058 on Kickstarter and $44,825 through InDemand pre-orders (10.7% of all funds raised). Meanwhile, the Airbolt: Truly Smart Travel Lock raised $202,306 on Kickstarter and $81,276 on its InDemand campaign, which comprised 28.7% of total funds raised. The campaign for the Trunkster raised $1,395,370 on Kickstarter and an additional $110,895 in InDemand (7.4% of total funds raised).

Platform fees for InDemand are 5% if you ran your campaign on Indiegogo, 8% if you ran your original campaign on another platform such as Kickstarter. and higher than 8% if you bring your project over from another platform and receive additional support from the Indiegogo team.

Mixing Platforms

Sometimes, project creators might choose to use one platform for pre-orders and a different one for pledge management and add-ons. Chris Muscarella, creator of the Field Skillet, says a platform’s aesthetics and design can influence the marketing your product. He used BackerKit for fulfillment and Celery (recently acquired by Indiegogo) for pre-orders.

“We wanted to run a campaign that felt organic and respectful of all of the backers who were going to help us make this thing a reality, which meant being turned off by other platforms that felt more aggressively commercial,” he says.

“We used BackerKit for managing fulfillment and add-on sales to our existing backers, and then we used Celery for additional pre-orders and add-ons on our own site,” he says. “We chose BackerKit because of the team and the support, which has been generally excellent. We chose Celery because it had a simple flow that wouldn’t confuse people and was very fast to configure.”

At the end of the day, the platform you choose is less important than what you do to market your pre-order store. Ramping up your promotional and marketing efforts will play a significant role in making sure your pre-order store is a success.  

The post Planning for Pre-Orders: Three Stories appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

An add-on is an optional item that can be added to a Kickstarter pledge without changing pledge levels. In the early days of crowdfunding, add-ons were extremely common in tabletop games, where project creators typically offer them in the form of extra cards, expansion packs, and components. Since then, add-ons have become popular for projects in all sorts of categories.

Think add-ons are irrelevant to your campaign? Think again. Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games recounts his experience crowdfunding tabletop game Viticulture on his blog. He initially believed that add-ons were “clutter” – unnecessary items that distracted from the main product – but recalls that backers would ask why his campaign didn’t have add-ons.

He soon changed his tune. “Some backers want more stuff, so you should give them an opportunity to get that stuff and support you in the process,” he writes. And then there’s a clear financial benefit, too. “We had the $65,000 stretch goal in sight, and so existing backers started adding more stuff to their pledge to help us get there.”

Testing Demand with Add-ons

Add-ons let backers to snap up what they missed during the initial campaign, or to pick and choose additional items that are outside their pledge level. From a business perspective, they’re justified: it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one. Your backers are a captive audience.  Sometimes, like in Stegmaier’s case, they can be so successful they unlock a campaign stretch goal.

Some project creators use add-on as a tool for gauging market validation. Gareth Everard, the project creator behind Rockwell Razors, used add-ons in BackerKit to “test demand for different products before proceeding with full production”.

“We make razors on Kickstarter, but the gamut of men’s grooming products spans a bit wider,” Everard says. He wanted to see whether it was worth selling a full suite of men’s grooming products and accessories.

“We used add-ons like Kickstarter, but of course we weren’t going to launch combs and shaving creams on their own KS campaign,” Everard says. “The great news was that we were able to see demand for every single product except for one. We’re able to test and pre-sell thousands of these products, so it’s a win-win for everyone.” Once add-ons for the Rockwell Razor Model T campaign have shipped, he plans to offer these products on the company’s Shopify store.

What Makes a Good Add-On Item?

Ideally, add-ons should be relevant to a crowdfunding campaign’s core product. They might enhance the original product in some way, or are a limited-edition item that isn’t offered in any pledge level.

For Everard, he chose add-ons that aligned with his aim for providing a “fuller, more complete range of men’s grooming products to add more value for people who are interested in upgrading their grooming routine”.

His campaign for the Rockwell Razor Model offered add-ons such as shaving cream, post-shave balm, beard oils, and beard conditioner, as well as additional hardware like beard brushes and folding combs.

When deciding which items to offer, be sure to factor in shipping costs (particularly if you are shipping physical items separately from pledge rewards; whether the item can be easily produced in bulk; and what value it offers to backers.

Budgeting and Pricing Add-ons

“There are a lot of production costs associated with the razors, but fortunately we have an existing product, the Rockwell 6S, which is revenue-generating,” Everard says. “The minimum orders for consumables are much, much lower than new custom razors,” he says. This meant that there were lower upfront costs for add-ons, which were easily covered by the cash-flow from Everard’s existing business.

Everard says he determines pricing for add-ons by researching market trends and evaluating the offerings of competitors.

“We have a consistent, across-the-board pricing strategy so that we can afford to go direct to the consumer, wholesale, and sell to our international distributors but still offer a very competitive direct-to-consumer price.”

Keeping Backers Satisfied

Everard says his first Kickstarter campaign for the Rockwell Razor was “crazy”. Things didn’t quite go to plan. As he wrote on a blog post  for VentureBeat, significant manufacturing quality issues derailed the initial success of the campaign. “It was at this time that we discovered the error of our ways,” he wrote.

“Having not visited the factory during production, and having not assembled, quality controlled, and shipped the razors ourselves, we’d never taken a close look at the full production product — we’d just assumed everything would be great. So we deserved every moment of Kickstarter fury that was about to follow.”

Determined to rectify the situation, Everard “went all in with his personal savings to ship out a replacement razor to all of our backers for free”. It was a costly move, but it worked: he says backers were “quite loyal because of our significant effort to get it right”.

Doing right by backers in the first campaign led to two more successful Kickstarter campaigns, and made an engaged, supportive base of backers more willing to buy additional products.

The post Razor-Sharp Strategies for Add-On Sales appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Fulfillment occurs at the end of the campaign but you need to get your cost estimates during the campaign planning phase so that you can price your shipping appropriately for your reward levels.

Estimate Shipping Costs

The first step to estimating your shipping costs is to weigh your rewards. The most popular shipping methods such as UPS Ground and USPS First Class base their costs on package weight. Figure out the shipping weight for each reward tier. Remember to also include the weight of the box and packaging materials.

Peter Imai from Whiplash warns that “the most common mistake first time creators make is not taking into account the weight and dimensions of the packaging necessary to house and ship the product.” Some creators recommend putting together a finished package and weighing it on a scale or even taking it to the post office.

Once you have your package weights, you can start researching shipping carriers and picking your shipping methods or start talking to 3PLs, third-party logistics providers that will warehouse your inventory and ship your individual orders.

If you’re shipping within the domestic United States, you’ll likely be using USPS, UPS, FedEx, and possibly a regional carrier. Most carriers will charge you based on package weight and the distance the package has to travel. If you’re using UPS or FedEx, you’ll also get hit with additional fees like fuel surcharges and residential delivery. The most affordable options will be the ground shipping methods.

USPS also has some interesting options like flat-rate boxes and First Class Mail that only charge for package weight regardless of shipping distance. Iman advises creators to pay attention to the services you might have to give up if you pick a lower cost shipping methods because “some of the low-cost methods will not include package tracking or insurance, both of which can save a good amount of future headache.”

If you have rewards that take up a lot of space, you might need to account for “dimensional weight.” Shipping carriers like UPS will charge more if your boxes exceed a certain volume and they have formulas that will give your package a dimensional weight based on its length, width, and height. If the calculated dimensional weight exceeds the actual weight, UPS will charge you based on the dimensional weight.

Whatever you do, don’t pay retail shipping rates. The retail rates listed by the carriers are the starting negotiating point.

You can obtain UPS and FedEx discounts by opening shipping accounts directly with the carriers or using a 3PL that has its own negotiated rates and you can get lower USPS rates by purchasing shipping online through tools like Endicia or Stamps.com.

Boxes, mailers, envelopes, and packing materials will also eat into your shipping budget. Don’t forget to include those in your shipping costs. It’s helpful to review shipping rates for various shipping methods before you decide on packaging because you can optimize package size to save on shipping. Charlie Brieger, co-founder of Fulfillrite, adds that “a box can add significant amount of weight and in a few cases tip it over to the next lb.” There are also certain shipping methods that offer a lower price for flat mailers. Knowing the price difference between shipping a bubble mailer versus shipping a box will help you make the right packaging decisions.

Shipping carriers increase their rates 3-5% each year. If your campaign ends in September and you’re shipping in January, make sure to budget for the increase in shipping costs. Build in margin to help handle unexpected expenses.

Also remember to budget time for picking items and packing boxes. If the workload is more than you can handle by yourself, you’ll need to account for hiring labor or paying a 3PL to help pack and ship your orders. Warehouse fees for storage, picking, and packing can add up to 50% on top of the actual shipping fees.

Plan for All Outcomes

Shipping rewards yourself is a viable option if you have sufficient space at home to store your inventory. There are a number of software services such as Shipstation and BackerKit Postage that creators can use to purchase shipping, print shipping labels, and keep orders organized.

Michael Dickson from Pangea Designs had a $3,000 funding goal for his project, the PiCo Titanium Micro Bottle Opener. The project ended up raising $139,768 on Kickstarter and an additional $31,160 in BackerKit add-ons and pre-order sales. He only needed 125 backers to hit his $3,000 funding goal but ended up with almost 7,000 backers total. Dickson was fortunate that the physical size of his product was incredibly tiny and he and his wife managed to ship out all of the orders from home.

Most project creators that raise fifty times their campaign goal will need to work with a third-party logistics provider to help with inventory storage and shipping. It’s worth it to sketch out your fulfillment plan in case your campaign dramatically overfunds. If you were planning on storing inventory at home and doing all of the packing and shipping yourself, you now have to pay a company to store and ship your rewards. If you didn’t add margin to pay for those fulfillment costs, you could end up in trouble.

Talk to a 3PL to get an idea of how much they will charge to do your fulfillment in case you overfund. Imai says that 3PLs will give you the best estimates after you have your backer data but they can still offer rough estimates if you provide detailed information about your reward items: “You should have an idea of your product roster, how many items in each reward, is there any assembly required post-production and pre-delivery, etc. The more you know about your rewards roster, the better idea you’ll have in terms of actual cost of fulfillment.”

Knowing the costs ahead of time will allow you to price your reward tiers and shipping fees to make sure that you won’t be buried by success.

The post How to Estimate Shipping Costs appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

The Creator Success team walks project creators through the process of setting up their project in BackerKit and helps them get up to speed on the features they can use to make their lives easier.

“BackerKit Success is as hands-on or hands-off as you need us to be,” Success Manager Thomas Sleeth says. “If you have questions, we’re hands-on in getting those sorted out. If you don’t want to talk to us every day and feel confident using the tool, that’s also great. You can go through the setup review and you’re on your way.”

Today on the blog, Thomas shares some advice on how project creators can use BackerKit to automate order creation, keep on top of backer requests, manage and export large troves of data, raise additional revenue, and streamline the fulfillment process.

Use the Item Generator

Thomas says the simplest way to ensure a smooth manufacturing and fulfillment process is to use BackerKit’s item generator. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that is designed to make it easy to manage pledge rewards, calculate and track production counts, and create itemized orders that make fulfillment a breeze. “Using the Item Generator solves a lot of problems out of the gate. It makes pledge questions, add-ons, SKUs – it does everything.”

Sometimes project creators might have more unorthodox requests. For example, Sleeth is working with a project that makes customizable bike locks and wants to display its pre-order items to reflect that its components can be selected individually. In these circumstances, project creators might be tempted to tackle the task on their own, but Sleeth advises getting in touch with BackerKit’s success team instead. “Email us beforehand so we can help point you in the right direction,” he says.

Survey Best Practices

Ideal times for project creators to survey backers can vary depending on the nature of the project, but Thomas says “generally 14 days after the campaign ends is the sweet spot”. “On Kickstarter, people will often have failed payments,” he says. “They’ll need to update their card, they might have a fraud warning, they might have changed banks.” It takes about two weeks for Kickstarter to collect funds and disburse them. That’s when you’ll know which backers have and haven’t paid.

Sending out surveys close to the campaign end date is also great for selling add-ons because the campaign is still fresh in the backers’ minds. Selling extra units and accessories is tougher if you survey months later after the excitement has died down. Project creators can also send BackerKit surveys to backers with failed payments on Kickstarter, giving them more time to save money and rejoin the campaign.

Figuring out what time to send out surveys is essential. “We generally recommend sending surveys out earlier in the week to get better survey response rates and add-on sales in BackerKit,” Thomas says. If you send out a survey on 4pm on a Friday afternoon, it’s likely to get buried in backers’ inboxes.

When to Lock Down Surveys

Locking down surveys lets project creators finalize orders so they are ready for production. Once surveys are locked down, no changes can be made to item selections. Project creators are often keen to lock down surveys as soon as possible. Thomas suggests determining a date based around your project’s timetables for manufacturing and shipping.

“In an ideal world, I would suggest locking down and charging people a week or two before sending out rewards,” he says. There are exceptions to that rule: the nature of some projects means some project creators will require final counts for the manufacturing process and are more likely to lock down surveys earlier. The downside of locking down early is it gives backers “less ability to make changes on their own” which will increase backer support inquiries. Thomas says that projects with more flexibility in manufacturing should choose a later lockdown date and use BackerKit’s production counts, which update dynamically.

Dealing with Survey Stragglers

Most backers are eager to complete their surveys as soon as possible. BackerKit data shows approximately 80 per cent of backers respond to surveys within the first 72 hours. That said, there are always those backers who take months and months to respond. There are plenty of reasons for this, Thomas says. “There are all sorts of confusion points: people not checking their emails, people with full inboxes. Some backers may have used an old email address on Kickstarter.”

BackerKit sends backers automatic reminders to complete their surveys, which can help jog a backer’s memory about a pledge they made some time ago. Thomas says BackerKit keeps records of pledges made years ago, so when long-absent backers get in touch years after a campaign has ended, they can be given BackerKit store credit.

Thomas also recommends reminding backers about surveys through their crowdfunding platform updates or through social media. “Posting updates on Kickstarter or Indiegogo or social media is a great way to get in front of those folks.” Most projects get to a 97% response rate or higher by the time shipping starts.

Making the Most of BackerKIt

Thomas recommends project creators offer add-ons for campaign-related rewards. Often, he says, backers will want to “mix and match” items from pledge levels, but cannot do so on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. “Add-ons give backers the toolset to get that done,” he says, allowing them to purchase additional items from your campaign – and they give project creators an opportunity raise additional funds through BackerKit.

BackerKit also gives project creators the opportunity to make their pledges upgradable. “Backers can choose to switch from $30 level to the $70 level”, Thomas says, and they can do so on their own in the app. There’s no need for them to contact project creators for help.

Words of Advice

In Thomas’ experience, many project creators are fixated on calculating precise costs. On the one hand, this means they’re doing their research and trying to ensure they are well-prepared to cover the cost of fulfillment and shipping. On the other hand, this isn’t necessarily the best approach to take for a crowdfunding campaign if they treat those estimates as gospel. Costs almost always increase unexpectedly. “All of this stuff changes,” Thomas says. “There are a lot of unknowns and questions.”

Project creators need to be flexible with their cost structure to accommodate any unexpected changes. “Build in enough margin to ensure that when it is time to ship, you can ship things and not get too caught up in costs,” he says. “If shipping goes up, use that extra dollar to cover higher costs to other countries. View your campaign funds as more of a pool that allows your product to be constructed and delivered.”

The post Six Tips from BackerKit’s Creator Success Team appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

The fulfillment phase is a sticking point for many project creators, especially if international backers are involved. The majority of crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo are based in the US, where shipping within the country is relatively cheap compared to cost of mailing items overseas. However, if there are backers in the EU, shipping bulky or heavy items can cause costs to skyrocket.

Many crowdfunding projects feature the EU-friendly seal with the hopes of attracting more international backers but first-time project creators may not fully grasp what ‘EU friendly’ means in practical terms for their campaign.

What Does ‘EU Friendly’ Mean?

Mentioning EU-friendliness on the project page — in the shipping section, pledge levels, and near the page header — will make it clear that there will be no hidden costs or nasty surprises for backers. This is a compelling offer for EU backers because the usual process of ordering goods from overseas is a minefield of exorbitant shipping fees, customs fees, and taxes that make the final cost prohibitively expensive.

Andvaranaut, a backer from Spain and champion of the EU-Friendly movement, breaks down what costs are incurred when project creators ship packages to European backers from the US. He uses himself as an example, a backer at a $40 pledge level. In his hypothetical scenario, a project creator could ask the backer for an extra $10 for shipping, while subsidizing the other $10. The package is then sent with a declared value for $50. When the package is shipped, it will be inspected by customs, then subject to two levies — a 21% value-added tax ($10.50) and a fixed administrative charge of ($23). The backer is then expected to pay the total of these charges upon delivery.

In other words, a $40 reward pledge ends up costing the backer $84. It also comes at significant expense to the project creator, who has subsidized shipping costs at a steep discount. Andvaranaut adds that the declared value of packages should reflect the total amount paid for the item (including manufacturing, shipping, insurance, etc) rather than the manufacture value. If this total exceeds €22, the backer will have to cover all of these costs.

Creators can minimize these fees and taxes by warehousing and shipping product within the EU. It’s more cost effective for backers because goods will have already cleared customs and paid VAT at the port of entry. It adds complexity for the creator because they have to pay the VAT and arrange for warehousing.

The Dragoon Experience

For the team at Lay Waste Games, the question of whether their project was EU-friendly seemed like a no-brainer. “We were like, ‘We like people from Europe, we’re super-friendly to the EU’,” art director Nick Nazzaro says.

But they soon realized the designation was more than a state of being. “It requires having a warehouse in Europe and having goods shipped there,” says operations director and product designer Jonathan Ritter-Roderick. “It makes sense with a fulfillment company, but because we didn’t have one, we couldn’t be EU-friendly.”

In 2015, the team at Lay Waste Games successfully launched Dragoon, their first tabletop game, on Kickstarter. While the team easily surpassed their funding goal of $9,000 — 1,295 backers pledged a total of $88,020 — they say there were plenty of valuable lessons to be learned from their first campaign, particularly about international shipping and EU-friendly campaigns.

For game-makers, the EU is a huge market. Board games are popular throughout the region, and the prevalence of board game conventions and fairs makes it an important source for backers.

“Being EU-friendly is a big deal to a lot of gamers who aren’t in America or the ones that are in the EU,”  Nazzaro says. “It’s very important. People asked us if we were going to be EU friendly — and we definitely were not.”

Pick Your International Shipping Strategy

Shipping from within the EU — as opposed to sending items to the EU from the US — has clear advantages for project creators. Goods will have already cleared customs and paid VAT at the port of entry, which reduces costs and makes the shipping process swifter. On the other hand, shipping to the EU from the US or elsewhere will incur import duties, taxes, and other fees that typically result in backers bearing the cost.

Project creators who choose to ship from within the EU typically partner with in-country or region-specific fulfillment centers like Amazon.de, Nift, and Spiral Galaxy, to name a few. Working with a fulfillment center is less less time-consuming than fulfilling orders manually.

Some project creators may choose to offer free worldwide shipping. Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games offers a comprehensive guide on how to make this happen. Some key tips include limiting the number of add-ons for international backers and calculating reward prices so that they accurately reflect the cost of shipping.

Stegmaier also recommends obtaining exact quotes for your campaign to accurately gauge costs. Project creators should have a quote from the manufacturer of their product (including the cost of trucking from the factory to port), the freight shipping company, and the fulfillment partner.

European buyers comprised less than 20 per cent of Dragoon backers, but the team is determined to broaden their appeal to a global audience. For the next crowdfunding project, Lay Waste Games has plans to offer worldwide shipping by working with four fulfillment companies.

“We’re going to have a partner in Canada, Australia, a worldwide company and a US-based company,” Ritter-Roderick says. “It will make the experience so much better for the customers, so they can more affordably get what they want and more assuredly get they want.”

Calculate Your Shipping Costs Accurately

Delays in the manufacturing process can lump additional costs on project creators. If items don’t arrive at the fulfillment center on time, they may have to be shipped by air to overseas backers rather than by boat. Nazzaro says this risk can be mitigated in the first instance by making sure optimal reward prices are set for your product.

“It’s probably more risky and dangerous to price it too low because there’s all sorts of costs you will never anticipate without doing a ton of research,” he says. Higher reward prices offer a buffer in case any road bumps arise. A switch from boat shipping to air shipping, he says, can multiply overseas shipping costs by a factor of 10.

Custom Duties, VAT, and Unhappy Backers

No one likes nasty surprises — especially not backers. However, the path to fulfillment is fraught with potential setbacks.

If shipping to backers in EU countries, import taxes, customs duties, brokerage fees and a 21 per cent value-added tax should be factored into pledge tiers and the total funding goal of campaigns. (Remember that the total cost of shipping may vary within the EU itself.) If you don’t, you risk aggrieving backers, who are likely to wear the costs of an ill-executed EU shipping strategy.

Remember to account for size and weight when packaging your product. In the EU, for instance, flat rates on shipping only apply to items under three pounds. Ritter-Roderick notes that size is another important consideration when calculating costs, as well as whether you decide to use pallets (some countries specify plastic over wood).

Failing to tick these boxes can dent the positive sentiment and goodwill established between project creators and their financial supporters. Honesty is the best policy: don’t overpromise and underdeliver. Set realistic expectations, particularly when it comes to expected shipping dates for foreign backers. If things go awry, keeping backers updated about delays, manufacturing mishaps, or miscalculated costs is crucial.

The post How to Run an EU-Friendly Crowdfunding Campaign appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Studying the Best Sellers

We studied sales data from 1,568 projects with 15,525 different add-on items to determine the best practices creators should follow when setting up add-on items during the survey process.

We found 1,222 add-on items that had backer attach rates above 10%. Here are the insights that we learned from studying these best-selling items.

Images Are Essential

This discovery shouldn’t shock anyone, but images matter. 95.74% of the best-selling items had at least one image. Use high-quality images and BackerKit’s gallery feature to upload multiple images that showcase each item from all angles.

Beautiful images get backers excited, and detailed shots can help answer product questions and convince people to make a purchase.

Descriptions: Brief and Relevant Works

If the product image draws people in and gets them interested, the description closes the sale. 85.3% of best-selling add-ons had a text description. The median description length was 137 characters. That’s less than a Tweet.

Think about your target audience and write a description that will highlight features and benefits while also answering any questions that will help backers make an informed purchase decision.

Item Selection

Larger add-on menus generally result in more sales but the best thing you can do is make sure that you offer items that backers actually want to buy.

Based on the data, your best selling add-ons will be additional units of the main pledge item, variations of the main pledge item or the no-brainer accessories that pair well with the main pledge item.

You should already have these items offered as pledge rewards or stretch goals if you planned your campaign well.

We recommend offering all pledge reward and stretch goal items from the campaign as individual add-ons. Many backers use add-ons as an a la carte menu that lets them put together their own custom pledge reward bundle.

If you have inventory from previous campaigns or your back catalog, you can offer those items as add-ons too. Your fans will appreciate getting exclusive access to older items that might not be widely available anymore. We have several repeat project creators that have us import all past add-ons into surveys for their latest campaign.

If you have items with limited inventory, you can set limits on the total quantity available and per-backer purchase limits to help drive attention to those items and make sure that you don’t oversell.

Keep in mind that adding more items increases fulfillment complexity. If you’re using a third-party logistics provider, you might want to scale down on the number of items because you have to pay for picking costs and storage fees. At the very least, take into account the fulfillment costs when setting prices and shipping fees for add-on items.

Pricing: Customize By Pledge Level

If you give backers the option to purchase additional pledge reward items as add-ons, we advise pricing the add-on the same as the original campaign price. Some backers over-pledge with the intention of using the extra funding to pay for additional units.

If you had different pricing for the same item in different pledge levels, you can use BackerKit to offer that same pricing to backers in different pledge levels. For example if you have a $5 pledge level for a single pen and a $20 pledge level for five pens, you can use BackerKit to make sure that backers in the $5 pledge level can buy additional pens at $5 each, while backers in the $20 pledge level can buy additional pens at $4 each.

Shipping Fees: Offer Free Shipping

An astounding 96.7% of best selling add-ons offered free US domestic shipping. If you have add-ons with high profit margins, consider covering the costs for free shipping even if you have to pay for the increased package weight.

Also understand that you can charge less for shipping items as add-ons if you know that they’re going to be shipped with the backer’s existing pledge rewards.

Creators will often build the cost of the shipping into the item price to make it easier for backers to make the purchase decision. If you’re already paying to ship a 4-pound package, going up to 5-pounds will probably only increase your shipping cost by a couple of dollars.

If you do have to charge shipping, for heavier items or bulky items that have to be shipped separately for example, don’t let your worst-case scenario determine the shipping fee for everyone. Set shipping fees for the major countries to make sure that everyone gets charged a fair rate.

You can also set your US domestic shipping fees so that customers that are located closer to your shipment facilities subsidize customers that live further away so that it all balances out in the end. You can add in some margin to account for returned packages but you don’t have to price shipping as if every package is going to the opposite coast.

That said, make sure you have accurate shipping cost estimates when you set your shipping fees. Know your box sizes, shipping weights, and courier rates for everything. Build in some shipping fee margin to account for mistakes and unforeseen expenses. If you underprice on shipping, you’ll be responsible for the shortfall.

Use Categories and Show Popular Items First

If you have a large number of add-ons, create add-on categories to make it easier for backers to browse the add-ons menu.

Place your most popular items first or on the top row of items to maximize visibility. You can rearrange your add-ons by using the “sort add-ons” section at the top of your add-ons editing page. If you notice that an item is selling especially well, you can move the item higher on the page to make it more visible to backers that haven’t answered their surveys yet.

Don’t Waste the Opportunity

Your backers will only go through the survey once. This means that you should set up all of your add-ons prior to sending out your surveys. If backers answer their individual surveys before you have add-ons ready, you’ll miss out on offering add-ons to those backers.

Keep in mind that offering add-on items isn’t just about selling things as a store. It’s also about making it easier for backers to get what they want and support you in the process. If you show care in curating, presenting, and pricing your items, it will create a better experience for your backers.

Contact us if you want to know more about how you can use BackerKit to offer add-ons during the survey process or are interested in using BackerKit to organize your fulfillment process!

The post Best Practices: Survey Add-on Items appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Using BackerKit without a Campaign

BackerKit had a fantastic 2015 by all measures. We helped 711 projects create surveys and manage pledges for 1,258,564 backers. In 2014, we had 451 projects with 757,635 backers. We wanted to close the year and celebrate the coming new year by sending a thank-you gift to all of our customers.

We worked with Emilio Santoyo, our good friend and fantastic designer, to create a special t-shirt featuring our fearless BackerKat starting on a new crowdfunding fulfillment adventure.

One problem with giving out t-shirts is that we needed to ask nearly a thousand project creators for their shipping address and t-shirt size. Fortunately, we have access to certain resources and possess a very particular set of skills that allowed us to collect gift preferences and shipping address information very easily.

We created a “Happy 2016 from BackerKit” project in BackerKit and imported all of our creators as backers using our backer import tool. We wanted to give creators the option to receive a t-shirt or to decline it and have us make a charitable donation instead since not everyone needs yet another awesome t-shirt.

We did this by giving each survey $5.00 in complimentary credit and then offering the t-shirt bundle and charitable donations as optional add-ons priced at $5.00 each.

We picked Watsi and the Red Cross as our two charities. Watsi crowdfunds life-changing medical treatments for patients in need all around the world. We added the Red Cross to give creators an instantly recognizable charity option, but we also wanted to introduce people to Watsi.

We’re big fans of the work Watsi is doing and wanted to highlight their efforts.

One unexpected side effect of structuring the donations as add-ons is that a good number of creators used their complimentary credit and then added on more donations as add-ons, so they ended up giving more on their own.

We used BackerKit again when it came time to ship everything out. We created item SKUs for each item which allowed our software to aggregate information from all of the survey responses and organize it into structured data for fulfillment.

We used BackerKit Postage to purchase postage and print out shipping labels and then we held a small packing party at the office to get everything packaged.

Using BackerKit to handle the survey and fulfillment process was a great exercise for the team and gave us insights into how we could use our software outside of the crowdfunding space.

If you have a problem that you think you can solve using our software, please contact us to see if we can create a solution for you. Our main focus is on crowdfunding fulfillment but we’re always interested in exploring new applications for our software!

The post Alternative Uses for BackerKit appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

Keep Your Project On Schedule

Campaign management services can be divided into two categories: “front-end” services that backers interact with such as the backer survey and the “back-end” tools that the creators use to manage backer data and the overall fulfillment process.

After the project campaign ends, backers have a limited view of what actually goes on during the fulfillment process. They’ll read a few project updates, answer surveys, and then packages magically appear on doorsteps a few weeks (or months) later.

Backers never see what goes on behind the scenes unless the creator shares stories about the fulfillment process through project updates. You can be all sunshine and rainbows in your backer communications up front while your fulfillment operation in the back is actually a hodgepodge of spreadsheets and broken dreams.

Here at BackerKit we want to make sure that all of our creators know exactly what to do to keep their projects on schedule and have the means to do so. That’s why we built an entire suite of back-end tools to help creators manage backers and get them to shipped status.

Backer Dashboard

The Backer Dashboard gives you an overview of where all your backers are in the entire process.

We accomplish this by using backer status levels such as “Survey Not Answered” or “Ready to Ship.” You’ll be able to see the progress of all of your backers and have the ability to drill down at each status level to see available actions and information on what needs to be done to move each backer group forward to the next status level.

For example, if you view all backers that haven’t answered their surveys yet, you will have the option to send survey reminders to the entire group. For backers that have answered surveys, you can lock down their responses to freeze item counts for manufacturing, charge credit cards to collect payment for add-ons and upgrades, and finalize shipping addresses to mark backers as “Ready to Ship.” You can perform all of these actions on entire status groups to save time.

Once backers are ready to ship, you can use our export tools to pass the data to your shipping fulfillment partner or print out the packing slips if you’re doing the shipping yourself. You can even use BackerKit to purchase USPS postage and batch print shipping labels. You can batch upload tracking numbers with a CSV file or import them directly from your fulfillment partner and we’ll send out shipment notifications automatically.

Backer Profile

Every project has a profile page for each backer where you can view and edit the backer’s order information and perform actions to move the backer up or down a status level. For example, if a backer is in “Locked Down” status, you can move them forward by finalizing the shipping address or move them back a step by unlocking the order.

Over two million backers have gone through our system and we’ve seen every kind of support request imaginable. We’ve built everything you need to provide excellent customer service for your backers.

Project administrators can edit personal information such as the backer’s name, shipping address, and email address. Admins can also edit the order contents, pledge levels, add-on items, and add complimentary credit or refund orders made in BackerKit. You can save notes on each backer account and view backer changelog histories to get up to speed on each backer quickly.

Backer Search

Creators can use the backer search function to find backers easily. It sounds like a simple feature but project creators didn’t have the ability to search through their backer list when Kickstarter originally launched.

Backer search is the very first feature we built for BackerKit and we’ve continued that strategy of filling in the post-campaign fulfillment service gaps ever since we published that first tool. BackerKit has grown to the point where it really has become the missing back-end for your crowdfunding campaign.

Contact us if you’re worried about the fulfillment process, or sign up now if you’re ready to take control of your project!

The post The Back-End for Your Campaign appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.