BackerKit the Best Crowdfunding Tool for Kickstarter and Indiegogo

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of BackerKit.

BackerKit helps crowdfunding campaigns survey backers and provides order management tools to turn those responses into structured data ready for manufacturing and fulfillment.

We often get a lot of questions around BackerKit, so we’ll try to answer a few of them here.

Q: Why can’t I manage my own orders and surveys?

A: Unless you are really good with excel (advanced user), data manipulation, and have a good idea of basic scripting, managing order data from a campaign is a lot of work.
Kickstarter offers basic tools to manage backers and orders, but it can still be a challenge.
Common challenges include:

Additionally, Kickstarter presents a few more challenges:

• You cannot export all of your orders into a single report
• You must send unique surveys to each backer level separately
• Each time a backer completes a survey you must re-export the entire report for just that single backer level

It’s hard to communicate just how difficult the process is until you’ve gone through the pain.
So, if you are confident of your ability to manage your database of backers, then maybe you could give it a shot, however, when you’re not eager to do this on your own, BackerKit just makes sense becausethey solve all of these problems.

Q: How much work is it to do the minimum amount of work needed for Floship to process my orders if I don’t use BackerKit?

A: By no means is this a science, but just a gut feeling. This assumes you do all the work that you need to do and Floship does whatever it can do to help you.

• Maintain your own database of backers
• Constantly sync your own database with new backer data coming in from Kickstarter or Indiegogo—this is probably the biggest pain unless you are good with scripting
• For each backer order, you’ll need to give the the QTY of each SKU for each order, the customs values, and customs descriptions
• Get 100% complete and accurate addresses for all shipments—this is also a huge pain
• You’ll also need to fit the spreadsheet data into our format for easy importing
• Rough estimate is an extra 40 hours for work for a small campaign, and easily hundreds of hours for a large campaign

We once had a project that was delayed two weeks from when the goods arrived to when orders shipped simply because the project creator realized that many of his addresses were wrong, missing important data, and–moreover–had lost all of the foreign character formatting.
And… they didn’t know how to easily reference the original characters from Kickstarter back to his own master excel file.

Q: BackerKit seems expensive, is it really worth it and do I really need to use it?

A: One of the most overlooked benefits  BackerKit provides is the ability to get more sales by offering a pre-order store to sell your products to backers even before your campaign begins.
It also supports add-on item sales which can take the form of up-selling other products or cross-selling similar products to your customer base during the survey process.
Some examples of upgrades can include express shipping or priority handling for certain VIP customers. Customers also have the option to contribute to higher pledge levels through BackerKit, in case they change their mind from their original pledge.

Customers have told us that the extra income generated from add-on sales, and pre-orders reduces the cost of using BackerKit significantly.
In some cases, we’ve been told that the campaigns even managed to generate even more money from BackerKit services than the service costs. In other words, they make aprofit from using BackerKit and they get the time-savings from using the service too.

Q: Is there any benefit or discount if I use both BackerKit and Floship?

Using BackerKit + Floship will save you time as Floship supports native report formats from BackerKit.

Additionally, for a limited time, Floship customers can have the BackerKit setup fee reduced from $299 to $149.
Contact a Floship sales person or account manager for this offer, click here to get in touch.

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