Generated Shipping Costs Update for Publishers

Thanks to the feedback during our OneBookShelf Town Hall, Tech Support has implemented an opportunity to generate shipping costs before your Crowdfunding.

This information is also listed on our Publisher Knowledge Base as well.

We’ve made it easier for you to get shipping estimates to most major destination countries for your crowdsourcing campaigns. You can now use the “Send complimentary copy” tool to upload the customer CSV file below to a “Group” and then generate the current freight cost of shipping to your backers in each country. This CSV file contains the random residential addresses to the most popular locations of shipping print-on-demand rewards.

Our current implementation of this bulk ship cost estimator requires that you have a similar-sized book or card deck already present in your publisher account by the printer and passed pre-media before utilizing this process. The reason for this is because you want to make sure you are pricing the book correctly.

An example book listing used will need to have passed premedia and be ready for production before this process will work. (Later we hope to offer a dedicated tool that won’t make this necessary.)

1. Download the CSV here: shippingcostcheck_ver8.csv
2. Create a new Group here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/pub_groups.php importing the CSV file to create the group.
3. Once the CSV is uploaded into Groups, you can navigate back to the Titles tab of the Complimentary Copy tool: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/pub_mailing.php
4. Select the title(s) and format on which you’d like to estimate freight.
5. Select how many copies of each title, if applicable. Click Next.
6. Choose the new CSV group that you recently created under the Recipients tab.
7. Hit Next on the top right corner and wait for the system to calculate freight and for the payment page to load.

Screenshot of Complimentary Copies Tool Payment section with generated shipping costs to several countries.

1. You will now see the following page. You can toggle to show the shipping details on or off. By default, the details will be hidden.
2. On the right, you will see the estimated freight cost to that country.
3. If you do not plan on finishing, exit the tool and do not hit Review Order.

Notes on freight rates to certain countries:

Canada

The freight rates for books (not cards) shipping into Canada vary a lot based on two factors.

The first factor is that there are roughly three groups of freight pricing within Canada based on region. These are provided as canada1, canada2, and canada3 @onebookshelf.com emails in the example CSV file.

Canada 1 is Southern Ontario and Quebec. Canada 2 is everywhere else in Canada except the more remote locations of Canada3. Canada 3 is Nunavut, Northwest Territories, and Yukon.

The second factor is the carrier which also then determines if Canadian customs are pre-paid or not. Books are printed in the US and shipped into Canada by two different carriers. Sending complimentary copies will automatically choose the less expensive carrier option. The first carrier is regular post from USPS to Canada Post. This is usually the cheapest method for small, light book shipments to Canada 2 region and nearly all shipments to Canada 3 region. Recipients may be required to pay duty and duty-processing fees when receiving their shipments from Canada Post. The second carrier option is Purolator (a Canadian parcel delivery company). This option is used for the majority of shipments into Canada. Under this option, part of the freight rate includes pre-payment of the 5% duty on imported books and the books are cleared through customs so there is no duty or duty-processing fee due from the recipient at delivery.

To calculate this 5% duty and include it in the freight rate, our system checks the selling price you have set for your book(s) here on site. This price will be used for your in-box packing slip price, and your declared customs value for the book. Therefore we take 5% of that site price and include it in the freight rate as the prepayment of Canadian duties. This is why the freight prices you see estimated for Canada will often vary according to the total site price set for all books in your shipment.

Brazil

Book freight estimates to Brazil tend to be high because only premium, trackable shipping methods are used. Less expensive, untracked shipments to Brazil suffered high rates of being lost in the Brazilian postal service so we only ship via trackable methods to Brazil.