So the fulfilment of the latest BattleTech Kickstarter „Mercenaries“ is drawing near. Backerkit has already collected the VAT for the pledge. All fine. Now the want to collect postage & delivery fees. Also fine except one thing:

In the campaign CGL said „local shipping rates“ would be to be expected for 90% of all backers. (see picture from campaign)

Now, here in Germany the main delivery service is Deutsche Post/DHL and a 10kg box, 500€ insured, tracked and up to 120 x 60 x 60 cm comes in at 10,49€.

Let’s have a peak on what backerkit is trying to charge:

$35.46 or 32,85€ – more than three times the usual shipping rate. Or almost 50% of my original pledge.

So how did this happen? Did CGL get greedy? I doubt it. Has Backerkit fucked up at some point and is calculating shipping from the US and not the promised EU hub? Maybe? Is there even a EU hub yet? I don’t know. Did some programmer just simply fucked their code up? Also a possibility. Easy to guess that the KS comments and the Facepage groups are „a bit up in arms“ right now.

And what does CGL say? I quote from the KS comments:

Hi there backers,

We have received notifications from backers that the shipping charges for orders, primarily internationally, have been above what was expected for this project. This is to say, we absolutely agree.

For some context, these are not charges that have been generated by BackerKit or Catalyst ourselves. Our fulfillment house has generated these shipping charges based on the current price of shipping as they see it and how it is to be shipped (PO boxes, sizes and amount of boxes to effectively ship, etc.) These charges are not meant to make profit on any backer’s order as they are being paid separately by us.

While we knew going with a higher quality shipper would be pricier, we did not know it would be to this level for some of you. There could be packing inefficiencies with especially small and large orders that could be leading to higher shipping charges to the best of our knowledge. We’ve spent last night spot-checking and pulling some of the more pricey charges to bring to our fulfillment house to see exactly how these charges are being calculated. If there is any part of these charges that does not seem correct to us, we will let you know and have these charges re-evaluated, likely pushing back our lock date.

There is a chance that these charges are correct and this is just the state of mass distribution. If that is the case, Loren and the distribution team plan to come up with a solution to help us stand with our backers.

We can assume that they will not be able to get back to us until after Easter weekend, where we should have a statement that I will post here updating all of you about the re-evaluation.

My next steps will be:

• sit back
• watch the mob run around headlessly with torches and pitchforks
• have a cup of coffee
• and wait till end of next week.

If it’s an honest mistake it will be sorted. If someone just fucked it up it will get sorted. If CGL comes forth and says „yeah, those *are* the shipping cost“ then I will grab my torch and fork and join the mob.

Have any of you backed at higher levels? How are your shipping costs looking?