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.

The holiday season is fast approaching and those with a projected “holiday 2018” delivery date should be shipping as soon as possible. Crowdfunding rewards can make for fun and unique gifts, but failing to deliver on time can be doubly disappointing for gift-givers negatively effecting the conclusion of your campaign. Things will get busy during the holidays and delays tend to cascade. Best practice is to plan ahead and ship early.

On the flip side, delivering goods on time can go a long way with your backers helping boost your reputation, especially for those hoping to run another campaign in the future. It’s always a good idea to send regular updates to your backers about shipping timelines including any potential delays you may encounter. Your backers will appreciate your transparency as long as you’re clear about any delays. And check out these other useful tips for supporting your backers to keep them positively engaged.

Assuming you’re still planning on shipping before the end of the year, we’ve complied some helpful resources and tips to help guide you this holiday season. Firstly, be sure to bookmark these useful 2018 shipping timetables based on carrier:

USPS 2018 Holiday Newsroom
FedEx 2018 Holiday Shipping Services
UPS 2018 Year-End Holiday Schedule

BackerKit Postage: Ship to anywhere, right from home

Realistically, a large majority of projects don’t reach their initial shipping deadline. Our resident shipping expert Thomas Sleeth has a few tips you may want to consider during this potentially hectic time:

• Expect things will take longer than you hope. The holiday season puts strain on every part of shipping infrastructure – if things take a little longer at one stage, those delays can cascade and change when backers get rewards. Do everything possible to build in some buffer time in order to account for delays.
• Don’t over promise. It can be really easy to commit to splitting up orders or offer something special to an individual backer. While these can be nice, they will also drastically increase the amount of work/complexity involved in getting things shipped.
• Consider getting faster shipping. If you are down to the wire, the extra day or two can make the difference in getting things in on time. Be aware this will raise the costs of shipping significantly.
• Get backers something for the holidays. Even if things are late, consider making an image/card that people can print up and gift in time for Christmas,  Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, and other winter celebrations. This can help build anticipation and get people receiving the gift involved with the campaign’s progress!
• Don’t waste time packaging rewards. If you’re shipping things out from home, look into tools like BackerKit Postage that let you work with batches of orders at once. This will drastically reduce the amount of time and potential error that go into getting things shipped out.

Shipping your items early will make the entire crowdfunding experience much more enjoyable for you and your backers.

If you have a project that still needs fulfillment and/or shipping support, you can learn more about BackerKit Postage or contact our shipping department at shipping@backerkit.com. We’d be happy to help make this part of the process smoother creating a nice bookend to your campaign.

And check out these helpful links to make sure you’re ready for the holidays:

Six Tips from BackerKit’s Creator Success Team

Shipping with BackerKit: DIY with Scale

Six Things to Know About International Shipping

The post 2018 Holiday Shipping Tips, Deadlines, and Resources 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.

Experimenting is an integral part of product development process at BackerKit. It helps us figure out ways to improve our services for creators and backers, and sheds light on which processes work and which don’t.

Recently, customer success manager Thomas Sleeth decided to see what in-house fulfillment would look like – that is, packing and shipping rewards for a project creator on their behalf using BackerKit Postage.

Almost 400 projects have used BackerKit Postage to date. It’s designed specifically for DIY crowdfunded projects. It’s tailored to smaller projects with approximately up to 4,000 backers and serves as a low-cost alternative to working with fulfillment centers, which often prefer to work with projects that can promise ongoing repeat business.  

“Fulfillment centers are great if you don’t want to send things out yourself, have a lot of backers or are shipping orders across multiple e-commerce platforms,” he says. That said, for creators of smaller-scale projects, it generally makes more sense to send products out directly rather than enlisting outside help.

Enter BackerKit Postage. It automatically groups together all your orders which have the same items, and lets you purchase postage and print packing slips for each of these groups in bulk. This makes it easy to pack your items, affix a label, and ship them. It suits US-based creators that like rolling up their sleeves and have access to a decent-sized space for the packing of items.

Sleeth’s experiment with in-house fulfillment builds on this service. “It makes a lot of sense for a project creator to print postage labels from BackerKit and use our organization tools to go directly into fulfillment,” Sleeth says. “But there are some people who might not want to ship things themselves, so we wanted to experiment and see what it would look like if it was done in-house.”

Sleeth says he considered suitable projects with smaller-sized backer base – between 400 and 4,000 backers – and relatively small-sized rewards. He decided to work with the creators of Pon, a circular, coiled pin that lets you hang pictures on your walls without puncturing them.

Initially, the Pon team had planned to use BackerKit Postage and hire external help to physically pack and ship rewards, so the match made sense.

Sleeth and two other members of the Success team packed and shipped 1,000 orders of Pon over three days – the entire process took 28 hours. The process ran smoothly, but it took a little bit longer than expected.

More experiments are in the pipeline! If you have a project of a similar size (400-4,000) with under 10 items and are interested in enlisting BackerKit’s help in getting rewards shipped out, drop us a line at hello@backerkit.com.

The post Shipping with BackerKit: DIY with Scale 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.

Fielding questions from backers can flummox first-time project creators and veterans alike. The bigger your crowdfunding campaign, the more likely you’ll be flooded with feedback and queries – positive and negative. Keeping a cool head can be easier said than done, especially when you’re juggling the demands of running and promoting a campaign.

Project creators should aim to respond to backer inquiries in a timely and polite fashion. Being empathetic to backers’ concerns is especially crucial: a little understanding can go a long way in placating your most fervent supporters.

If you’re feeling stuck, don’t worry! There are plenty of resources on BackerKit and elsewhere that can help.

Providing Support on Kickstarter

Gary Canino, community support specialist at Kickstarter, says that the nature of the crowdfunding life cycle can be confusing for first-time backers. “It’s not a store, it’s about bringing projects to life,” he says. “We often explain to people that they’re backing something that’s in progress, it’s being made.”

Tensions can be mitigated by managing backers’ expectations. Whether you’re posting updates while the campaign is live or heading into the fulfillment phase, it’s best to be clear with your backers.

Questions from backers about shipping can often be the most thorny, particularly if project creators run into production problems that result in significant delays.

Michael Kent, BackerKit’s Head of Support, says keeping backers in the loop is important, although an update often begets more queries. “One the one hand, you want to be as transparent as you can with your backers,” Kent says. “On the other hand, posting updates does seem to cause people to contact you, even if you’re just checking in.”

Striking a balance is key. “I personally like being transparent and posting project updates every month. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb,” Kent says. “Even if you don’t have much to say, letting backers know that you’re there and you’re working, it definitely puts their minds at ease.” Kickstarter’s Canino concurs. “Transparency is good, honesty is good,” he says. “Delays do happen – and that’s totally OK.”

There’s a tendency for project creators to shy away from updates when they run into trouble. “Lots of project creators, when they hit a hurdle or speed bump, realize that they’ve got a delay in front of them, there’s often apprehensive about sharing that with their backers right away, because they don’t want to rock the boat or get backers angry and writing in,” Michael says says. But the alternative – staying silent – will only result in more backer messages.

If creators find themselves in a pickle, Kickstarter’s Resources Compendium is a one-stop shop for campaign troubleshooting. It includes the Creator Handbook, which covers all aspects of the crowdfunding journey from pre-launch to the fulfillment phase; common FAQs about the Kickstarter platform; and Campus, a forum where project creators can ask fellow peers for advice on support best practices.

How to Minimize Backer Queries

Kent has worked on close to 1,000 projects. He says a number of recurring themes dominate the backer queries he handles.

“The number one question for backers is, ‘When is my reward shipping?’, Kent says. “That’s probably the case for crowdfunding campaigns all over the world.” To allay these concerns, Kent recommends keeping backers in the loop with regular project updates. “Every single project update should mention some projected shipping date of some kind,” he says.

He also recommends making an “incredibly conservative estimate” when it comes to shipping dates. “Get the estimate that you think you can do and double it, time-wise. No one will ever be upset if you ship your rewards to them early,” he says. This will prove helpful should you run into any unforeseen obstacles in the fulfillment phase.

Other common queries include requests to make changes to survey responses and product-specific questions about their rewards, including refund and return policies. Project creators can minimize many of these queries at the start of their crowdfunding campaign by clearly outlining the information on their project page.

Questions about return policies and refunds are extremely common. Kent suggests addressing these topics “at the start of the campaign”, and making sure that they are clearly articulated to backers.

“Refunds should be part of the FAQ of every single crowdfunding project across the board,” he says.

Handling Survey Questions

Backers might contact project creators with questions related to BackerKit. They might have difficulty navigating the site, or responding to a survey.  The most queries are about making changes to survey responses, updating mailing addresses,  questions about declined payments, and the occasional missing survey.  If you’ve enabled BackerKit support for your crowdfunding campaign, the BackerKit team handles all of these routine questions.

Sometimes, backers might not be aware that they can make changes to their survey on their own before responses have been locked down. Similarly, backers can update their addresses until the project creator marks the pledge as ready to ship.

If a project creator is handling support on their own, they can draw on the resources in BackerKit’s Help Center, which covers the most common queries, or direct backers to relevant articles.

How to Manage Feedback

“One of the most difficult things for project creators doing support is there are so many channels,” Michael says. “Between the emails that come through surveys, the messages that come through Kickstarter, Facebook, social media, there’s so many different places where you need to keep your backers updated.”

Streamlining communications can make a huge difference to a creator’s workload. “If project creators are using BackerKit, they can post a link in their updates, which is a contact form that has backers contact us directly,” he says. “That really takes a lot of work off their plate, because there’s a place where backers have a portal and contact form where they submit their request and it comes straight to us.”  Similarly, if project creators receive questions from backers on social media, they can respond with a link that lets backers contact BackerKit directly.

If project creators are managing their own support, Michael advises centralizing backer communications on the platform they prefer to be contacted on as much as possible. Doing so on the crowdfunding platform you’ve used for your campaign makes sense, as it’s the primary avenue where backers have placed their orders.

The post Supporting Your Backers: Tips for Creators appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.

When a crowdfunding campaign draws to a close, project creators typically witness a sudden influx of last-gasp backers rushing to back the project before it ends. Fresh attention is great news for any campaign, and a final surge of support can help to carry a project over the funding finishing line. But what can project creators do about those who missed out?

Enter pre-orders. Offering pre-orders can propel your campaign’s momentum outside of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, giving backers the opportunity to contribute to your campaign after it has ended. They’re an easy way to raise additional funds, which can sometimes end up covering platform fees or unexpected surprises in the fulfillment phase. Either way, the business case is compelling.

Sometimes, project creators raise more in 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.

Once the campaign ended, they offered pre-orders for digital and physical copies of the Friday the 13th game, art books, soundtracks, digital rewards, and other branded merchandise through BackerKit Pre-orders.

Friday the 13th made more money in pre-order sales than in its crowdfunding campaign, amassing $1.365 million from pre-order sales in BackerKit alone.  

Alternatively, project creators can use pre-orders as a way to improve and iron out the flaws in their initial campaign. In fact, that’s what Jym Daniels did. Once his Kickstarter campaign for the Think Ink Pen met its funding goal, he used Indiegogo and Shopify to give his fidget-focus toy a second life.

“We launched our Kickstarter campaign on November 1, which is a terrible time of year – just before Christmas,” Daniels says. “You would never, ever want to launch any crowdfunding campaign before the holidays.” He intended to launch months earlier, but the marketing company he enlisted wanted to hold off the campaign until additional video content had been created.

The campaign met its funding goal, but Daniels had expected to raise more for the project. “We were pretty disappointed,” he says, but not discouraged.

“We knew it was still going to take us three months to produce the product, so why not continue to take preorders?”

Setting Up Shop

There are many ways to run a pre-order store. You can set one up independently, use a platform like Indiegogo or Shopify, or host a store through the BackerKit app. Pre-order stores hosted by BackerKit allow you to manage your campaign backers and pre-orders in the one place, and you can use a widget that places a store on your own website.  

Setting up a pre-order store requires some planning. Don’t leave it ‘til the last minute! Regardless of the e-commerce platform selected, project creators should plan ahead to set up their store and test links to ensure backers don’t drop off once their crowdfunding campaign ends.

Once you’ve set up shop, it’s time to promote it. Don’t let your project recede from backers’ memories: make sure your followers and contact lists know that it is taking orders. If you’ve run a Kickstarter campaign beforehand, consider using Spotlight, which allows project creators to link to external websites, including your pre-order store. If you’ve set up a pre-order store in BackerKit, the app generates a link for project creators to share on social media and Spotlight. The app also prompts backers to share the link to your pre-order store with their followers on social media once they’ve completed your survey.

Some project creators worry that offering pre-orders after the campaign’s official end-date might frustrate their most loyal supporters. We’ve found such fears are unfounded. It’s now very common for crowdfunding campaigns to move into pre-orders.

Project creators can create some differentiation between 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.

Strategies to Drive Pre-order Sales

On December 14, 2016, Friday the 13th announced the release of two betas in a project update: there would be one for ‘Friends and Family’ (early supporters) and a ‘Pre-Order Closed Beta’ (for backers who pre-ordered the game on Kickstarter or BackerKit). Anyone who pre-ordered the game through BackerKit received five beta codes as well, which could be passed on to friends – a neat way to fuel excitement (and sales) through word of mouth. The project update also included a link to the BackerKit pre-order store.

To drum up more buzz, Friday the 13th announced it would stream the Pre-Order Closed Beta on Twitch. These marketing strategies helped fuel a large spike in preorders, which provided vital upward momentum and helped push the project from the $600,000 plateau to over 1.3 million in BackerKit pre-order sales.

The creators posted monthly project updates until the close of the pre-order store in April. These included the introduction of new character concepts, additional Twitch streams, and appearances at PAX South.

Meanwhile, Daniels and his team decided to take pre-orders for the Think Ink Pen on Indiegogo InDemand. He says the platform’s standing in the pre-order market and its exposure to news sites made it a no-brainer. He took the opportunity to supplement his marquee product, the Think Ink Pen, with related products such as ‘fidget sliders’, desk toys, and bundled deals in the InDemand campaign.

 “We had a marketing company that devised for us an official launch, social media and news strategy, but they were finished up in December.” So, Daniels and his team devised a marketing strategy of their own to drive in pre-orders. They sent emails to a database of around 5,000 people, posted updates on social media channels, and secured a placement in Indiegogo’s promotional newsletter.

As it turns out, his bet paid off: the project raised about $150,000 in Indiegogo, compared to $67,000 on Kickstarter. “Initially, we would have been lucky to break even with our Kickstarter campaign. We did not fully expect our efforts on Indiegogo to double what we made on Kickstarter.”

They did, however, have a secret weapon: their product video. Daniels promoted the video through Facebook ads and paid for it to appear on Gadget Flow. From there, it was picked up by Viral Thread, which re-edited it and released it, and the rest is history: it was shared by social news sites like Unilad, which boast nearly 30 million Facebook followers, and 30-odd marketing sites on the web.   

“Content is truly king,” Daniels says. “Media mentions help, but nothing compares to the experience of being picked up by a social influencer or large social media site. We immediately got contacted by people everywhere, who make their own version of the video.” He says project creators should keep this in mind. “If I were developing a product today, one of my big factors to consider is: what kind of content can I build around it?”

Daniels believes video content is worth the investment, particularly if the product has demonstrable and aesthetic appeal. “We’re investing most of our ad dollars in creating good video content around our product and delivering it to the companies that have picked it up in the past,” he says. He’s also looking at building more affiliate relationships with companies that post videos on their sites in exchange for a small fee. “It’s not a bad deal to acquire a customer and only pay 10 per cent, versus 50 per cent on a wholesale retail spread.”

The post Pre-orders Best Practices 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.

Every project creator knows that meeting your funding goal is the first milestone in a crowdfunding marathon. Many more hurdles abound in the fulfillment and shipping phase, particularly for crowdfunding campaigns with a sizable base of international backers.

We spoke to project creators for their tips on how to make international shipping as seamless as possible.

Is International Shipping Worth It?

Two-time project creator and Redshift Sports co-founder Erik de Brun’s most recent Kickstarter campaign was for the Shockstop, a shock absorber for bicycles. “We took the time before running the campaign to make sure we had a means for fulfilling internationally,” he said. “The preparation we did was to get some rough estimates for international shipping costs, identify 3PLs we could work with to handle that international side, and then make sure we were representing the shipping costs in the campaign itself.”

Being able to provide low-cost international shipping to backers is a great drawing card for any crowdfunding campaign, but it takes a lot of preparation to ensure the process is as smooth as possible. A project creator’s capacity to provide international shipping to backers will largely hinge on their financial resources and willingness to explore partnerships with fulfillment centers and 3PLs.

Even though shipping can eat into campaign funds, de Brun says it’s a worthwhile tradeoff. According to BackerKit data, 38 per cent of backers reside outside of the United States. “It’s a benefit we provide as a brand,” de Brun says. “We’re trying to lower the barriers to access. Kickstarter and e-commerce in general have lowered that barrier a fair amount, so we try to do as much as we can.”

Fulfillment Centers and 3PLs

Samantha Rose and Brian Rose, the team behind GIR kitchen utensils and the Voltaire smart grinder, are veteran project creators. They’ve created six campaigns on Kickstarter, all of them successful in meeting their funding goals.

The products they create — unibody silicone spatulas, high-performance coffee grinders, and low-profile bottle stoppers — don’t typically require assembly, but there’s a lot of complexity in their fulfillment workflows. A typical GIR crowdfunding campaign has over 200 SKUs, which can make fulfillment more complicated. With that kind of complexity, you need to be able to communicate with your warehouse to solve problems quickly.

“The ability to make that personal connection with the human beings that are packing your inventory is so valuable,” Samantha says. “We previously worked with a 3PL with much greater scale. There were a lot of benefits to that, but when things went wrong, there was no one to talk to. We couldn’t say, ‘Hey, can you tell us what you’re seeing on the shelf?’” She advises project creators make an in-person visit to their 3PL center and set expectations for the fulfilment phase of their campaign. Her advice is echoed by Podo Labs’ Eddie Lee, who also recommends getting quotes from different 3PL providers and visiting their facilities in person.

At a crowdfunding panel held by BackerKit and Kickstarter earlier this year, GAMAGO co-founder Greg Long emphasized the importance of factoring fulfillment and 3PL logistics costs into your campaign’s cost structure. “If you’re using 3PL, it’s typically going to cost 12% of your wholesale price,” he said. As a result, fulfillment can wind up taking a significant bite out of a project creator’s gross profit. Long noted that partnering with 3PL companies in China or Amazon could help project creators save on distribution costs.

Returns and Lost Packages

Dealing with returns and lost packages can be frustrating for backers and project creators alike. Return policies vary between project creators and can depend on the type of reward or product offered to backers. For hardware makers, having a clearly articulated warranty and returns policy in place is essential. To get an idea of best practices, research similar campaigns or reach out to project creators in similar industries for advice.

Keeping costs as low as possible comes with certain compromises.“Ultimately you can provide very robust shipping services to almost anywhere in the world, but it costs a fair amount of money to do so,” de Brun says. “Especially with crowdfunding, a lot of customers want to pay the least amount they can with shipping. What that means is that it comes with this idea of using economy-type shipping  — using USPS and affiliates to deliver packages.” But even carriers with the best reputations can run into problems. “What this means is that you start to give up on tracking stuff,” de Brun says. You may know when a package left the country, but you don’t know what happens when it hits local postal carriers. It becomes a lot more work when it comes to diagnosing problems when they arise.”

As a result, de Brun says the company’s approach to lost packages is focused on the customer. “When someone didn’t get a package, we build this into our cost-of-doing business to resend the package in those cases. We don’t spend a lot of time figuring out how to recover lost packages. We’re focused on getting backers the product.”

All of GIR’s products come with a lifetime warranty. “We tend to be really customer-centric,” Samantha says. There were occasions where there would be discrepancies between what a backer had said and the notification provided by a delivery service. “If the post office says they delivered it — but the customer says they never got it — which side do we take?”

GIR’s policy has always veered toward the customer — and it’s likely to stay that way.  “As a creator, these customers engage with us on Kickstarter where there is a leap of faith in the first place because they’re supporting something that doesn’t yet exist,” Samantha says. “The backers take a leap of faith at the beginning of the crowdfunding process. We take a leap of faith at the end of the process by honoring that faith with a no-questions-asked returns policy.” It’s a stance that doesn’t come cheap. “This is probably to our own detriment financially,” Samantha says, “but to our great benefit from a relationship standpoint”.

In GIR’s 2014 crowdfunding campaign for its silicone lid series, there were a “tremendous amount of lost shipments, all of them international”, Brian says. This happened in the company’s early days on Kickstarter, when the learning curve was particularly steep. “We don’t budget for returns or lost shipments because it’s so variable over time. We eat the cost of that upfront,” he says.

This year, GIR have had far fewer lost shipments by taking extra precautions. “We paid for it in advance by pre-emptively upgrading to DHL shipping for troubled shipping zones — places where we’d lost packages in the past, like Israel,” Brian says. Meanwhile, other project creators have had fewer problems with lost packages. Jean Wu, a first-time project creator and cofounder of the Que Bottle, says a relatively small number of packages were lost in the shipping process. “We did have to deal with returns, wrong addresses, and wrong shipments, but these were relatively low — perhaps under 5 per cent,” she says.

The GIR team says budgeting in advance for lost packages is difficult because project creators are locked into the shipping tiers offered through Kickstarter, but over time Kickstarter, GIR and BackerKit have become more experienced and attenuated to the pitfalls of international shipping. “Three or four years ago, there was one shipping rate that could be identified for the US and one for the rest of the world,” Brian says. “Now you can break it down country by country.” He says each campaign keeps getting better “because everyone’s getting more grown up”. It’s especially beneficial for first-time creators, he says, who “don’t have to go through the same growing pains”.

For de Brun, he says he allocates a “small percentage” to lost package costs. “We’re only talking about a handful of packages out of 1,000”, he says. “Delivery services are generally reliable, especially when you are delivering to places with multiple carriers. There are more problems with remote areas or imperfectly translated addresses, and some of the more premium carriers have methods to check whether addresses are valid.”

Which Countries Should I Ship to?

When crafting an international shipping strategy, project creators might consider the countries that pledge the most to crowdfunding platforms and budget for shipping costs accordingly. Alternatively, project creators might want to swing for the fences and create a comprehensive shipping strategy that serves backers in as many different countries as possible.

Wu went for the latter approach. She says she did a lot of research online, and obtained quotes from different fulfillment partners and mailing services. “We compared all of these figures and used them to create a range for our worldwide shipping budget.” Que Bottle’s backers spanned North and South America, Asia, Europe, Oceania, Africa.

Kickstarter and Mashable compiled the statistics on the top ten countries in terms of funds pledged.

Picking Couriers and Mail Services

GIR uses a variety of courier and mail services that are made available through their fulfillment warehouse. “Depending on weight, volume, and destination, we can send packages inexpensively through carriers that use local services for the last mile, although sometimes we are forced to use more door-to-door services like DHL and FedEx,” Brian says. “That’s another area where BackerKit has allowed us to handle with a lot more sophistication than we otherwise might be able to. It makes us more modular.”

Companies like Floship and Shipwire connect third-party logistics firms and couriers to provide warehousing, fulfillment and shipping services. Project creators are able to tailor the delivery of their packages to their needs with a choice of regional, national, and international postal carriers.

Customs and Taxes

Shipping orders to backers in the European Union adds another layer of complexity to the fulfillment process. 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 account for all of the costs ahead of time, you risk aggrieving backers, who are likely to bear the costs of an ill-executed EU shipping strategy.

“As a US-based company doing a Kickstarter, it’s great to be able to offer products to international customers,” de Brun says. “And it’s good to offer them at a reasonable shipping cost. International customers have to deal with import duties, sometimes taxes, and if you have big shipping costs on top of that, it’s a turnoff for a lot of people.”

De Brun says affordable worldwide shipping costs is a key part of his company ethos. “We offer free shipping to domestic customers, which is built into our carrying costs. We extend that in a way to our international customers by subsidising the shipping cost they end up paying.”

Most project creators will choose to ship from within the EU to minimize the costs borne by backers, typically partnering with in-country or region-specific fulfillment centers like Amazon.de, Nift, and Spiral Galaxy, to name a few. Click here for a more detailed guide to making your project EU-friendly.

Communicating with Backers

Many queries from backers will pop up during the fulfillment process. Wu says she received and responded to queries from backers through BackerKit, direct emails, as well as comments on the project’s Kickstarter campaign page and Indiegogo InDemand page. She says swift responses are a great way to maintain goodwill and trust between project creators and backers, but cautions against flooding backers with project updates unless it’s important. You might want to consider a project update if there are unforeseen delays in the manufacturing process.  

“We responded to comments daily,” Wu says. “But it wasn’t necessary to post too many updates all the time unless it’s a big announcement or it affects a lot of people. We’ve only written 19 updates from the start of our campaign through to fulfillment.” Posting a project update often triggers a new wave of backer comments and emails which creates work for whoever has to respond to backer messages. The BackerKit support team often coordinates with larger projects to time updates so that the staff is ready to handle the support inquiries.

Learning from Past Campaigns

With six campaigns under its belt, it’s unsurprising that GIR runs a pretty tight ship. “We’ve shipped 5,000 packages in the three weeks before Christmas, and 95% arrived in time with the right items in them,” Brian says. “From that perspective, there’s not a whole lot we could do better.” However, he does see room for improvement on international shipping. “It would be nice to find a way to account more granularly for lost packages or difficult places to ship to,” he says. “I think we can better at it over time.”

Meanwhile, Redshift’s de Brun is keen to explore options for warehousing in the future. “Having done two campaigns, a lot of fulfillment, customer service, and shipping, we would keep much of our approach the same,” he said. “But as we grow our business and shift more items internationally, we’re looking for ways to end up warehousing in places where we have a density of shipments, so we can eliminate duties. Ultimately we want to save everyone money in the long run.”

The post Six Things to Know About International Shipping appeared first on Crowdfunding Blog & Resources | BackerKit.