08 Mar CROM – Shipping a Big Box of Minis
Although we are not able to announce our launch date quite yet (more about that below), we want to take a moment to talk about how we’re trying to make shipping as reasonable as possible.
Any time you see a Kickstarter that includes a bunch of miniatures, terrain, or other large pieces, the first question you may ask is, “How much is this going to cost to ship?”
And you should ask this question. Boardgames are expensive to ship in general, and miniatures even more so. The size, shape, and weight makes them more difficult to handle than paper products, so you can almost always expect that there will be a significant shipping cost. If you see a Kickstarter that has surprisingly cheap costs for shipping a big box of minis, you can expect that one of two things has happened:
- They’ve added some shipping cost to the price of the game to make it sound cheaper.
- They’re eating some of the shipping cost, making it more likely that they will run into cost overruns that will affect fulfillment. This can be especially true if a Kickstarter has underestimated its international backer count, and they were hoping to subsidize a few international orders with a high volume of slightly increased domestic prices.
At Ulisses, we try to be as realistic as possible with our shipping costs. But we also want to make prices inviting to as many different customers around the world as we can. And the only real way to reduce shipping costs for the customer (and for us) is local shipping partners.
Ulisses Spiele is based in Waldems, Germany, and that acts as one of our primary shipping locations. That means cheaper shipping within the EU (and Germany/Switzerland in particular). Shipping to the UK is slightly higher, but not much.
Our North American shipping is partnered with Paizo, so we are able to ship domestically within the US.
And we are happy to announce that we are adding an Australian shipping partner for CROM (and hopefully other future Kickstarters), so there will be domestic shipping for Australia/New Zealand!
That means we’ll be including these three icons in our campaign:
We are working on the possibility of additional regional partners, but these are the ones we can guarantee at this time.
Why haven’t we launched yet?
We had been hoping to launch the Kickstarter itself by now, but we are being delayed just a little bit longer because we are waiting for final packaging and pricing information from our production partners. We cannot set realistic pledge, add-on, and shipping levels until we have those numbers. It’s important to us to be able to give you accurate prices right away at launch so that you can pledge with confidence and not have to worry about changing later as we figure things out.
When we have all that information, we’ll give a firm launch date. And we’ll share information as we get it so that you can know what to expect as soon as we do launch.
If you have any questions, feel free to share them on Facebook or in our forums. We’ll answer whatever we can!