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We have a – hopefully – final shipping update for your Season 13 rewards!
We are, again, incredibly grateful for your patience and understanding during these delays, but we hope you’re happy with your rewards! Thanks for all your support, MSTies.
Your Friends,
Team MST3K
We have some new information regarding the rewards shipping process we’d like to share with you all.
Next, here are some additional details about how the shipping process is going. The info we're about to share may seem a bit dry, however we felt it important to include some of the real-world minutiae of the shipping process, for those of you who have asked for further transparency.
The good news is, as of today we’ve shipped three-quarters of over 30,000 individual packages to our patient backers. So the rest of this info is expressly for the extra patient rest of you.
Early last week, a member of our fulfillment team traveled to the warehouse of our shipping partner in Kentucky to see how the shipping process is currently proceeding and to make specific suggestions for any needed changes to move things along more quickly and efficiently.
The process for packing your orders is entirely manual, which is one reason why the shipping process has been unfolding slower than we’d hoped. Boxes and concession kits also must be assembled in the warehouse. Each order is picked by an individual human before moving to packaging and, finally, a quality control pass to ensure each order is accurate.
The warehouse has been using a batching system to pack similar orders on a given day; this is why orders have not shipped in the order they were paid. Given the manual process, the warehouse folks believe this is much more efficient. If we’d known this was going to be the case, we absolutely would have let you, the backers, know that more complicated orders may ship much later than simpler ones.
There was also a brief issue with packing supplies; some early orders were packed with inflated air bags, which were unfortunately getting punctured during shipping and deflating, so the process now uses standard bubble wrap. (This is also how we learned that “leaky dunnage” is a real term in shipment parlance.)
Most importantly, we are relieved to report that the warehouse has added additional personnel, extra late shifts, and begun working seven days a week in order to improve the overall pace that shipments are going out.
We hope these additional details will help reassure those of you still waiting on your rewards. For specific questions about your pledge, please email us at [email protected]. Again, we are so grateful for your patience as we get these long-awaiting rewards on their way to all of you.
Your friends,
Team MST3K
We hope your summer is going swimmingly! We’ve got a couple pertinent pieces of information for you today.
First:
But don’t stress – your entire Gizmoplex library will still be available at Gizmoplex.com! ONLY the Virtual Theater will be unavailable during this time.
We’ve been working on some minor updates and improvements to the Virtual Theater portion of the Gizmoplex for a few weeks now, and while we’d hoped to do so without interrupting your access to it, we’ve realized that because we’re not currently running any events, it will be easier and more straightforward to simply close the theater for a short while to get the work done.
We anticipate that the Virtual Theater will be back and better than ever within a couple of months! We will share the reopening date as soon as we have one, and we’ll also tell you a bit more about the updates we’re making then.
Second:
The warehouse unexpectedly took about 12 days to start fulfilling orders after the shipping payment emails went out. We have also discovered that they are NOT shipping them in the order that payments were received, as we had been told would happen. This means many of you who paid for shipping immediately still haven’t received a shipping confirmation, and others who paid later may already be receiving your packages.
We know the email we sent had a 1-3 week window to expect shipping info, but apparently that’s not the case. We are deeply sorry for yet another delay for some of you, but if you received an email to pay shipping and you successfully paid it, then the warehouse has your order and will be sending it out, just possibly later than we anticipated.
We thank you all again for your patience and understanding as we move forward from this frustrating physical rewards situation. We are doing so much wiser than when we started, and keen to put the lessons we’ve learned from this campaign to use in the future.
Your friends,
Team MST3K
We’ve received confirmation that the shipping calculations are done at last, and starting on Monday, those of you waiting on physical rewards will receive an email with your shipping costs and a link to pay them.
Here's the important points you should know:
Again, we cannot thank you enough for your extraordinary support and patience throughout this process, and we are excited to know that some of you will be snuggling your very own Satellite of Love snowglobe (or hoodie, or stickers, or challenge coins, or…) very soon. We are powerfully grateful for your contributions.
Your friends,
Team MST3K
Didn’t I already pay for shipping at the end of the #MakeMoreMST3K campaign?
You paid for your pledge at the end of the campaign, but not for shipping costs. We wait to calculate shipping costs until we have your rewards ready to be sent out. This way we can get an accurate cost that accounts for the weight and packaging of your items. This also avoids the possibility of you under- or overpaying for shipping, if rates should change in the interim.
Hey, my shipping cost is more expensive/less expensive than I expected!
Avid readers of the backer updates may recall that when we received the first round of shipping estimates, we were surprised by the higher-than-expected costs, and that resulted in a bit of a scramble for more affordable solutions. This “comparison shopping” has been the main reason for the continued delays in recent months. Based on the info we have now, the shipping costs we are sending you represent the most reasonably-priced deal we could get.
My friend who also backed this Kickstarter is paying a different amount for shipping than I am. What’s up with that?
Depending on where you live, and what is included in your rewards, and how heavy and/or large your shipment box is, your shipping costs may vary from other backers you know. Shipping costs are based on weight and distance, so these variations are inevitable.
Why didn’t you just do flat-rate shipping?
A flat-rate approach would have unduly penalized folks who are receiving only one or two small rewards. It wouldn’t be fair for people waiting on stickers to subsidize the costs of folks who are getting snowglobes (they’re heavy!) or concession kits (they’re bulky!).
Why am I paying for 3D glasses shipping now?
We wanted as many of you as possible to have your 3D glasses in time for the premiere of The Mask 3D, but asking folks to pay shipping first would have slowed that process way down. To expedite this, our fulfillment partners shipped the 3D glasses out as soon as they could, and kept a tab for the cost to add to your shipping total. This way you only need to pay for shipping once.
I moved, or my shipping address has changed! Will my rewards go to my old address?
When you pay for shipping you’ll have an opportunity to confirm that your address is correct, or to update it if needed.
Can I change my t-shirt selection or size before my items ship?
Unfortunately, no – because these rewards are exclusive to this campaign, we only ordered what we actually needed to fulfill our obligations, so we don’t necessarily have a big pile of extras to swap out for you.
Why isn’t this email coming from BackerKit, where I already have a credit card on file?
We had to build a custom system to replace BackerKit for this part of the process, as BackerKit wasn’t giving us the precision we required to get your rewards shipped.
Remind me again why these rewards were delayed?
Our rewards production process ran into a series of obstacles, the first and most dramatic being the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the supply chain and on shipping logistics. Each reward requires components for manufacture, and those components must first be available, and then those components must be transported to the factory where the thing is made (this is usually an international trip), and then the thing has to be manufactured, after which the finished product is transported back across the ocean again (toot toot) to the US-based warehouse, where it waits to be shipped on to your eager hands.
Once all the rewards were made, we ran into further issues with the fulfillment process, up to and including how all these variously shaped and occasionally fragile items could be safely fitted into a box together, and what it would cost to send them to all our backers’ homes. It took awhile to get the first round of shipping estimates, and even knowing y’all were eager to get your stuff, we decided they were just too expensive, so our fulfillment partners then had to go back to square one and ultimately strike a discounted shipping contract for us with a different company.
I have a very specific question about my personal rewards situation. Who can I ask about that?
Email [email protected] with any questions. We expect a bit of increased traffic following the shipping announcement, so please be patient and we will respond as soon as we can.