V4W 2E: Rest of World Fulfillment

Ukraine, Mexico, Indonesia, oh my!

When we ship games to our Kickstarter backers I divide the fulfillment up into five different buckets: USA, Canada, Australia+New Zealand, UK+Europe, and Rest of World (ROTW). In the past I have talked about domestic fulfillment, so today I thought I would walk through the process and price of fulfilling to our ROTW Kickstarter backers. Since we are currently in fulfillment for the second printing of Votes for Women, I will use that process to illustrate.

The process is pretty simple. We ship our games from the factory to VFI Asia in Fujian, China. VFI Asia then packs and ships our games to a distribution partner within each country. Our games will be shipped together with games from other companies to each distribution partner, thus saving on the overall cost. In a few outlier cases, such as our lone backer in Peru, VFI Asia ships directly via FedEx.

Games on a Plane!

VFI Asia maintains a hub page - http:/vfi.asia/hub - that shows the status of the games for each delivery country. As the games just arrived at VFI Asia last week, they are being consolidated with games from other countries. As those shipments occur, VFI Asia will update their hub page.

VFI Asia’s hub status for Votes for Women

In addition to the list of countries above, VFI Asia has hub shipping agreements with companies in a number of other countries. Indeed, in the past, we used VFI Asia to ship to backers in Australia and New Zealand through Aetherworks in Australia. We now partner directly with Aetherworks as our distributor in that part of the world, so we ship our games from the factory to Aetherworks direct.

I marvel at how relatively easy it is to fulfill backer orders to six continents and VFI Asia is a crucial part of that process. But now let’s look at the cost.

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For the second printing of Votes for Women, we have 42 backers who ordered 69 games in the ROTW. That breaks down to 35 single-copy orders, 2 two-copy orders and 5 six-copy orders. The cost to ship to these backers is $1804.73.

We use a flat shipping rate - shipping is free in the United States and is $15/$25/$50 for one-copy, two-copies, six-copies for international orders. That means we collected $825 in international shipping for ROTW orders. However, shipping for us is obviously not free in the United States - there is a subsidy built into the price of the game of $15/$20/$30 for one-copy, two-copies, six-copies. That means we “collected” $715 out of the total price for shipping for these ROTW orders. That means we collected $1540 versus a cost of $1804.73, so we paid $264.73 more than we would have had we expected to ship these games to US backers. That breaks down to $3.84 per game. To be clear, we did not lose $3.84 per game, it just cost us $3.84 more per game to be delivered to a ROTW backer than a US backer.

Of course, the rate of shipping to individual countries varies widely. We only “overcharge” for shipping for backers in China and Hong Kong. Many countries - Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand - are priced right when considering the internal subsidy.

There are a few countries where we actually lose money on every backer. The cost of a single copy of Votes for Women excluding shipping is about $30 ($15.50 for production, $7.50 for royalties, $7 for Kickstarter fees), so if the shipping for an individual copy exceeds $60, we lose money on that game.

Rest of World shipping costs from Votes for Women (second printing) campaign

For our current Hunt for Blackbeard Kickstarter campaign, we have kept the same free US shipping and flat rate international shipping. My strong preference is to keep to this system because it doesn’t feel right to punish gamers in Brazil or Peru just because our shipping costs are so much more expensive.