What campaign shipping costs,
and why campaigns ship late.

Why campaigns deliver late

We measured 461 funded US campaigns: the median finished with 147 backers, which is the scale most of this guide is written for.

Late delivery is the norm on Kickstarter, not the exception. Research by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick found that most successful projects deliver later than promised, and a study he ran for Kickstarter itself found that roughly 9% of funded projects never deliver at all.

The reason is structural. A campaign page is written before the money exists, so every date on it is a guess. Then production slips, ocean freight takes its real four to six weeks instead of the two the schedule hoped for, and the address list collected at pledge time quietly goes stale. None of these are character flaws. They are what happens when the plan is made after the promise.

The fix is not optimism. It is planning the delivery backward from a date you control, which is the last section of this guide.

The math to do before you price shipping

The most expensive mistake in crowdfunding is set months before anything ships: charging backers less for shipping than shipping costs. Once the campaign closes, that number is locked. The difference comes out of your margin, one parcel at a time.

Two numbers decide your real cost. The first is dimensional weight. UPS and FedEx do not bill a light, bulky box by what it weighs. They bill length × width × height in inches, divided by 139, and charge whichever is greater. A board game box of 12 × 12 × 3 inches that weighs 2 lb is billed as 432 ÷ 139 ≈ 4 lb. Your parcel just doubled in price and nothing changed on the scale.

The second is the zone. US carriers price by distance bands, and the same parcel can cost meaningfully more crossing the country than crossing the state. You cannot know your backers' zones in advance, so price against a realistic mix, not against the friend who lives nearby.

The method that works. Build one real parcel with the actual box, the actual filler and the actual reward, then weigh it, measure it and quote it to three or four real addresses before the campaign goes live. Estimating from the product alone, without the box, is how shipping ends up underpriced.

Freight from the factory, and who is the importer

"The factory handles shipping" is the sentence that precedes most customs surprises. Someone is the importer of record on every shipment that enters the United States, and if you have not decided who, it is you. That means duties, entry fees and a customs broker are your problem on the day the container lands, not the factory's.

The terms to settle before production ends: DDP (the factory delivers with duties paid) or DAP (you take over at the border). Either can work. Not knowing which one you agreed to does not.

One more mechanical fact: a warehouse can only receive what it was told about. Cartons that arrive labeled, counted and matched to a packing list go to the shelf the same day. A pallet of unlabeled mixed cartons becomes a billable counting project. The packing list is cheap. The absence of one is not.

Addresses expire

People move. Every month between the backer survey and the ship date converts a percentage of your address list into returned parcels, and a replacement shipment costs full price the second time.

The discipline is simple: collect addresses as late as production allows, and lock the survey when the freight leaves the factory, not when the campaign ends. If your pledge manager supports address changes up to a cutoff, announce the cutoff and hold it.

A campaign is a wave, not a flow

Ordinary fulfillment is a steady stream of orders. A campaign is one wall of parcels, hundreds or thousands inside a week or two, followed by near silence. Pricing built for streams punishes waves: monthly minimums bill you in the silent months, and setup fees charge you for a relationship the wave does not need.

This shape has consequences you can plan for. Storage matters for the weeks the stock waits, not the year. Packing capacity matters enormously for one week. Whatever partner you choose, the question is not whether they can pack your wave, but what the quiet months on either side of it will cost you. Our own answer, with the rates that apply to a campaign, is on the Kickstarter fulfillment page.

International backers, stated honestly

Cross-border parcels carry taxes that someone must pay. Into the EU, VAT applies from the first euro, and the IOSS scheme lets it be collected at pledge time for consignments up to €150. Into the UK, VAT on parcels up to £135 is collected at the point of sale. If you do not collect it, your backer pays it at the door, plus the carrier's fee for the privilege: and finds out from the carrier, not from you.

Both models can work. Collecting at pledge time costs you setup effort. Deliver-duties-unpaid costs your backers surprise fees and costs you the support tickets that follow. What does not work is silence: whichever model you choose, write it on the campaign page.

What to ask any 3PL: including us

Quotes in this industry are built to be compared badly. These questions make them comparable. Ask them of every warehouse you talk to; the answers, in writing, are the contract that matters. Ours are published on the crowdfunding fulfillment page, and the campaign calculator turns them into a budget.

• The all-in price of one order. Pick, pack, box, filler and label, as one number. A $3 pick fee with a $2 box fee is a $5 order.
• Receiving. Per box or per pallet, and what happens when a delivery arrives with no packing list.
• Storage during the wave. What the weeks before and after shipping cost, and whether a minimum keeps billing after the wave is gone.
• Evidence of condition. What proof exists of the state of your stock at intake, and of each parcel before it sealed. "Trust us" is not evidence.
• Errors. Who pays to fix a mispack, in plain words.
• Cutoff. The hour by which an order ships the same day.
• Afterward. Whether leftover stock can ship as store orders without a second onboarding.

The timeline, built backward

Start from the month you told backers, and subtract: transit to backers (up to a week domestic, two to four international), the packing wave itself (days to weeks, by count and kit complexity), survey reconciliation before packing starts (a week), freight from the factory (four to six weeks by sea from Asia, plus customs), and production's own buffer, because production slips.

Worked backward, the chain shows the real promise date. Most campaigns run this chain forward instead, from hope. That is the difference between a delivery update and an apology update.

This guide is published by EdCo Fulfillment, a fulfillment warehouse in Fairview, Oregon. It describes how the work actually behaves, and it holds whether or not your campaign ever ships from here.