Services
At Liya we work with many customers to fulfill projects funded on Kickstarter. If your project will be funded through Kickstarter, make sure to tell your project manager or our Business Director Chris Frye at the time of quoting so we can be sure to take that into account during our planning. We offer a few special services to customers with Kickstarter projects.
- Backer Packout - We can pack and label your products based on individual backer orders. You will need to provide us with the backer and order data, and we will make sure everything is packed and labeled for fulfillment. All you need to do when you receive the product at your warehouse is put a postage label on the box. No need for sorting or packing on your end.
- Kickstarter Payment Terms - Because Kickstarter can be unpredictable, we offer special payment terms for Kickstarter projects. For more details you can contact your project manager or the Liya business development team.
- Warehouse Support - We can provide additional support to your warehousing team through the implementation of a fulfillment and packout system on our website. If you are interested in this, please talk to your project manager or primary contact at Liya.
Kickstarter Hurdles
By working on hundreds of Kickstarter projects we’ve learned a few lessons along the way that may be helpful to you. Here are some of the possible hurdles you may experience with Kickstarter.
- Packout Complexity - It’s easy to get carried away by offering a lot of different SKUs for backers to mix and match and buy individually. While it is great to give your backers choices, make sure to consider how your offerings will affect the difficulty of packing and shipping. If you let backers mix and match too much, you can end up in a situation where you have hundreds or thousands of unique combinations of items to ship out – making fulfillment a real nightmare.
- Shipping - Don’t forget to include shipping in your costs. Many a Kickstarter campaign has ended up losing money for companies because the shipping costs (both from the factory to your warehouse and from the warehouse to backers) were not considered.
- Time Between Campaign and Fulfillment - Depending on how your Kickstarter was planned, it may be months (or even longer) after the campaign ends before product starts shipping out. Make sure to prepare for this possible gap, both from a backer PR level and a business financial planning level. You don’t want to end up in a situation where your operation or marketing costs end up eating away at your Kickstarter money, leaving you without enough to fulfill the product.