Ever wonder how a game can be made in China, and be shipped in an affordable way to your Kickstarter Backers or customers around the world? About six months ago, we were wondering the same exact thing!

When we were originally launching our Kickstarter campaign for Emergence back in March, we assumed it was very expensive to ship items to Europe or Australia. We went to our local post offices, UPS stores, and FedEx to get quotes for shipping to European countries, and they were quoting us prices that were 5x to 10x more expensive than shipping domestically! So for a minute (yes, only about a minute), we thought that maybe we should only allow customers in the United States to back Emergence because we did not want a bad customer experience by charging EU or AU backers $50-$100 to receive a game. We clearly had our homework to do!

Our not so Brilliant Original Plan

Originally, we were in the mindset that we can ship the games to our house locally and directly send the games to all 2,000+ backers from our house in Bellevue. Not only was this a foolish thought, but it was a very amateur thought... And we want to be professionals!

This would get the games to our 2,000+ backers in four different continents. However, it is very time consuming to box the 2,700 games AND very expensive to ship nearly 1,000 games internationally. We simply can’t afford this!!!!!

Homework

It was back to the drawing board!

We first thought that maybe it’s too expensive to ship internationally, so we considered only allowing US backers to back Emergence…. Only for a second. We know that there are many United States based board games on Kickstarter that are able to send games to Europe or AU, and they are able to only charge about $10 to the backers for shipping.

So we did our homework and realized there are essentially three methods.

1). Ship everything to your house. Then grab a ton of those USPS Flat Rate Boxes and ship it out yourself. (Only realistic for less than 500 Backers)



2). Ship everything to one company (ShipNaked, Fulfillrite, SendFromChina). Then have them do it for you. (Not EU Friendly as backers will have to pay VAT)



3). Ship your games to four different companies in four different regions. Then have them do it for you. (Great for EU Friendly, and cost savings over $5000!)

We opted for option 3. For our numbers at 2000+ units shipping our games to four locations made sense both cost wise and speed wise. We could ship it to a regional location and then use local shipping rates, also it helped mitigate our risk by spreading it out to different companies. We discovered that one of the cheapest ways to ship internationally is to deliver the games in bulk (freight) to a nearby port. From the port, you would ship the games to a fulfillment center (A place that takes your big boxes of games and ships them separately to each individual backer.)