Fulfillment partners

A fulfillment partner is a warehouse that ships individual orders to individual customers. You send them a pallet of games and a spreadsheet (or platform integration) of addresses, and they pick, pack, and ship each order. For a crowdfunding campaign with a few thousand backers, a fulfillment partner is not optional. Packing thousands of parcels yourself is a weeks-long ordeal that experienced creators uniformly regret.

Fulfillment pricing has several layers: receiving your inventory, monthly storage, a pick-and-pack fee per order (commonly a base fee plus a smaller fee per additional item), packaging materials, and postage. Postage is usually the largest single cost, and good fulfillment partners get discounted carrier rates that partially offset their fees. All-in fulfillment cost for a single-game order within the same region typically lands somewhere between 8 and 20 dollars depending on game weight and destination, which is why campaigns increasingly charge shipping separately after the campaign through a pledge manager.

Several companies specialize in tabletop fulfillment and understand the specific rhythm of a crowdfunding project: a huge burst of orders in week one, then a long tail of pledge-manager stragglers, retail sales, and replacement parts. Games-focused partners also handle things generalists fumble, like shipping a single replacement punchboard or splitting a multi-wave campaign.

When evaluating partners, ask for a full rate card, confirm they integrate with your pledge manager, and check which regions they serve directly. Ask for references from creators of similar-sized campaigns. And ask about their error rate and how they handle mispacks, because at a few thousand parcels, even a 1 percent error rate means dozens of unhappy backers.