2025-03-18

I had a hard time finding any information about what people do at the end of the Kickstarter campaign, when they have to send their rewards out. Probably because if you're a massively successful campaign, you hire people to do it, and if you're not, then you just, like, put stuff in the mail, I guess? Well, this is how it went for me, in March 2025.

(If you're new here: I ran a card game Kickstarter in May 2024, which funded 110%, with about 100 backers.) I used AdMagic for production and BackerKit for post-campaign backer management. I had a great time working with AdMagic, I would absolutely use them again. BackerKit... eh, I get the feeling it was designed for much bigger campaigns than me, and I probably would have been able to handle it all on my own with spreadsheets. The payment processing would have been a huge hassle, though. But this post is about fulfillment!

First, through some surprisingly long chain of shippers and receivers, a guy in a truck showed up at my house and wheeled a pallet of games into my garage. (I'm so glad he didn't just leave the pallet on the curb. SO GLAD.) I was nervous about getting hit with extra charges or tarriffs or something, but I never did; what I paid AdMagic covered the whole production and shipping process. But this is the end of their involvement; now I have 500 games in my garage, and now I have to send 120 or so out to backers and pre-order-ers.

Difficulty modifier: I only had 5 days between receiving the games and leaving town for a month. I REALLY wanted to get everything shipped before then, because my backers had already been waiting almost a year. Don't be like me. Give yourself time.

  1. In BackerKit: "lock orders" and "lock addresses with notification." This will give people a couple days to update their addresses. I forget if you "charge cards" now, or wait until you've added in all the shipping charges. I think I ended up charging folks twice in short succession and I feel kind of bad about that, it was probably annoying.

  2. You will need: a printer (get the brother laser printer, it's fine) and a postage scale (I think I got mine from stamps.com for free at some point? A food scale would probably also work tbh).

  3. Once everything's locked in BackerKit, export the HTML pack list, print it, and sort into piles:

  • no address (sigh)
  • declined credit cards (sigh)
  • special cases like your mom or your BFF, to whom you'll be hand delivering
  • then, finally, sort by box size needed.
  1. Order shipping supplies. But seriously, like, measure and count first. And give yourself time.

If you're really smart, you'll make a product that can be shipped in a USPS flat rate box, which can be obtained for free from USPS. I am not smart. I ultimately needed several sizes of box--one game, two games, one game with zines, etc. I ordered a test bundle from Paper Mart, loved it, but realized it would only be big enough to handle "one-game-no-zines" orders. So then I atually measured and counted how many boxes of which size I would need, went to place another order, and discovered that rush shipping would cost like two hundred dollars. Soooo I promised to make it up to the world later and looked on Amazon, placed next-day orders for boxes of the appropriate measurements... and when they arrived, discovered they were about half the thickness I would expect of shipping boxes. Cool cool cool. Don't order shipping supplies from Amazon. Plan ahead and order from Paper Mart. (Note: nobody complained about the games arriving damaged, so I guess they all made it ok. But it was very stressful.)

I went to the local hardware store and picked up two rolls of packing tape. I ended up needing three, of course.

For box filler (paper/foam), I actually had enough on hand from (a) ordering the shipping boxes, (b) moving six months ago, and (c) accumulated paper grocery bags.

  1. Pack a test box of each configuration, weigh it, and get rate quotes for each shipping region (I used Pirate Ship for this). Go back into BackerKit and fill all that in. At some point it'll charge the cards for shipping. I may have some of the BackerKit steps in the wrong order. It's not an intuitive process when you "charge for shipping later".

  2. Buy and print shipping labels. Be aware that BackerKit/Stripe will not pay out your funds right away if it's your first time using them, so if you don't happen to have enough cash in your business account to cover shipping you may have to float it on a credit card. This is less of a problem if you are not trying to speedrun your fulfillment phase.

I used Pirate Ship for this, and highly recommend them. This was by far the easiest part of the whole process. They give you a link to what printable labels to use. (Oh yeah, order a pack of label paper too.) They let you upload spreadsheets and buy/print shipping labels in bulk. This was by far the easiest part of the process.

(I knew international shipping costs were going to be astronomical, but, wow. They were ASTRONOMICAL. I didn't charge my international backers the full shipping costs, I didn't have the heart.)

  1. Actually pack your boxes. Double check the packing slip on each box. Pack em up good. Tape em up good. Worry about your games getting damaged in transit because of the flimsy Amazon boxes. Write the recipient's name in pencil on the outer lid before you tape em up, so that you won't get your labels mixed up.

  2. Go to the USPS website and schedule a pickup. Turns out you can totally tell them to pick up 54 boxes weighing a total of 125 lb the next morning, and they will, with a smile, and not charge you dime for it. USPS is awesome.

  3. Add your tracking numbers into BackerKit. Watch as your games make their way to their forever homes. Sigh in relief.

  4. Nag the people who didn't give you addresses, or whose cards got declined, periodically until you feel like you've done your due diligence. I think I still have 3 unresolved backers. If one of them is you, please get in touch!

  5. Bonus for shipping out local orders: I decided I wanted to send all my local orders out for delivery via bicycle courier CCC PDX. Besides being "an extremely Portland thing to do," I dunno, it felt silly to put all these packages in the mail to go less than ten miles. They were super easy to work with and seemed excited about the idea; I sent them a spreadsheet of addresses and they quoted be $15 per delivery. This is a few dollars each more expensive than it would have been to mail them, but I felt it was worth doing. And all the bicycle packages got delivered on time and, I assume, intact, as nobody complained.

  6. Congratulations, you did it!! All that's left now is to mark your BackerKit campaign complete and... figure out how to (sell)[https://ko-fi.com/s/829caf3927] the rest of the pallet of games now sitting in yoru garage.

None of the vendors here paid me to talk about them. But if they'd like to, hey, my DMs are open.