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"Fulfilling" Aspirations of Success

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braincog
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Joined: 12/31/1969

I'm in the process of manufacturing my first game, Portrayal (http://www.braincog.com/portrayal.html), and am trying my hardest not to make too many silly/costly mistakes.

I'm wondering if anyone can share their experience using fulfillment companies? Since I have no desire to store 5,000 copies of my game in my dining room, I'm thinking that partnering with a compnay that provides warehousing and order fulfillment services may be the way to go.

I'm wondering what companies people have used, whether it made sense economically, and if going this route helped with getting the game noticed by distributors or retailers. Some of the companies I've gotten manufacturing quotes from also provide fulfillment, so it doesn't matter to me if they also do manufacturing, or just fulfillment.

Best Regards,
Bill

Hamumu
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Joined: 12/31/1969
"Fulfilling" Aspirations of Success

I use www.plimus.com to handle my orders. They're oriented towards software, but they will do order processing and fulfillment of any type of item. There's a flat $4 fee for each item fulfilled (order processing costs 10% of sale price whether they're fulfilling it or not) and they charge shipping to the customer. For warehousing, it's free as long as what they hold is less than a 3-month supply (they assess that each month based on sales for that month). Over that, it's I believe $1 per cubic foot per month.

There's no real problem with them, although I sell CDs, which obviously are very small and light, so I was really annoyed to deal with an issue where a customer was charged $50 to ship one to Canada (that's the UPS 2nd day air rate or something), and Plimus wasn't able to remove that as a shipping option, or worse yet, make it not the default (at least not yet, they have said they'd see about doing something custom). They also don't provide any notification of shipping, though they claim to always ship within 48 hours of the order. Their support has been very responsive.

This fulfillment stuff is actually run by SwiftCD, which Plimus uses, so you could look at dealing with them, if you have your own order processing solution already. Despite the name, they'll store and ship anything.

These are kind of for 'garage developers', I imagine you could pay much less in warehousing for somebody who normally deals in 5,000 big game boxes and whatnot. $1/cu.f. would add up with big boxes! Or, just make sure you sell a lot. That's always a good plan.

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