V4W 2E: US Fulfillment
This is the fourth of five posts about fulfillment costs for the Kickstarter campaign of the second printing of Votes for Women. The previous posts covered fulfillment to “Rest of World” backers, to Australia and New Zealand backers and to Canada backers.
To recap, we do not charge shipping for delivery in the United States. We currently have a built-in subsidy of $15 for our games - so Votes for Women’s price of $75 is really $60 + $15 shipping. For this campaign, we utilized both Quartermaster Logistics (QML) and Amazon (AMZN) for domestic fulfillment.
As I noted in the post about fulfillment to Canada, it cost us $12,809.30 for 3834 games - or $3.26 per game - to get the games from the factory in China to QML in the United States. We forwarded the bulk of the games to Amazon and that cost $4545.64 for 2700 games - or $1.68 per game. The costs from QML were $1151.21 for prepping the shipment and the costs from AMZN were $3394.43 as detailed below.
Our initial plan was to ship individual and two-game shipments via AMZN and ship case shipments via QML - and the costs below bear out that decision making. We ended up shipping about fifty two-game shipments via QML because of the AMZN delays discussed below. That cost us an additional $450 (50 x $9) and we are now out of stock at QML.
It is a little troubling that all of these costs are over their intended subsidy, so I may need to rethink how we approach what we charge customers for shipping - both domestic and international.
It might be fair to say that the entire campaign for the second printing of Votes for Women was cursed. When we launched the campaign, I had a target of $200,000 in sales and had budgeted $20,000 in advertising via Facebook. Of course, Facebook famously banned our ads because women’s suffrage is a “sensitive social issue.” We still raised $181,469 thanks to the community rallying to the campaign - and only spent a few hundred dollars in Facebook ads before the ads were banned - so this was kind of a wash.
We started production of this second printing back in 2023 and expected the production to be complete in January prior to Chinese New Year. There was evidently a dice shortage and the production was not completed until March - a unfortunate, but reasonable delay. Then, just as we were putting our shipping plan in place, a container ship - the MV Dali - crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The collapse of the bridge closed our home port of Baltimore for several months. We scrambled to put an alternate shipping plan in place and the main shipment of games finally arrived in at QML in Florida in August. We forwarded 2700 games on to AMZN and for some inexplicable reason it took five weeks for the games to get from Florida to North Carolina… just in time for Hurricane Helene to strike. AMZN shifted the games to Pennsylvania to avoid the hurricane and are now, finally, shipping to our individual backers - six months late.
In general, things could have been much worse. The games could have been on the MV Dali and been destroyed, or the games could have been damaged by the hurricane, or the games could have been caught up in a longshoremen strike. I am thankful that none of that happened, but what I am most thankful of all for is that 99% of our backers were completely supportive of us during this Kafkaesque fulfillment journey.
Really enjoy these posts, and yeah, you should swap out whatever dice you are using for your shipping rolls. ;)