One of the most challenging parts of any crowdfunding campaign, if what you’re trying to fund includes physical items, is getting them in the hands of your backers, no matter where they are based. There are fundamentally two ways to do it:
- You take care of it yourself, packing and shipping items with an established provider such as DHL, UPS or FedEx or
- Use a fulfillment partner that will combine the various items available according to the rewards of your campaign, and then ship them all over the world through them.
Doing it yourself vs. using a fulfillment service
For crowdfunding projects, the first option is economically feasible only when you’re shipping packages within your own country. You’ll soon find out that the rates you’ll get for worldwide shipping, with parcels sent independently from each other, are wildly higher than sending full pallets of rewards to a central hub and get the sorting done by a professional company. For a simple reason: they enjoy rates you, as a small creator, could never even dream of.
Should you use a crowdfunding fulfillment service then, and what are the downsides of doing it?
In this article, we’ll examine the rates, pros, and cons of two popular companies…
