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Gah. Almost $100 in VAT. Oh well, I knew it was coming. Hopefully they can bring the shipping down a bit if it’s causing a stink.

The same with me. With a combined Battaillon &Addon Pledge of ca. 480$, i was was hit with ca. 100$ VAT and now 120$ Shipping (incl. VAT) to Europe.

Ouch! My shipping to UK is just under $70 which I don’t think is too horrible, but looks like some Europeans are getting hit for hundreds of dollars.

Late backer.
Got a $150 pledge with $150 addons.

No emails or prices sent to me yet, but I see this in my backerkit account:



About what I was expecting with the VAT and shipping.

(Still annoys me we pay VAT on shipping fees though)

$163.33 shipping+VAT for a $150 pledge and $165 worth of addons. I had to get those hardcover novels though.

Project Update #83:

Hi there backers,

We have received notifications from backers that the shipping charges for orders, primarily internationally, have been above what was expected for this project. This is to say, we absolutely agree.

For some context, these are not charges that have been generated by BackerKit or Catalyst ourselves. Our fulfillment house has generated these shipping charges based on the current price of shipping as they see it and how it is to be shipped (PO boxes, sizes and amount of boxes to effectively ship, etc.) These charges are not meant to make profit on any backer's order as they are being paid separately by us.

While we knew going with a higher quality shipper would be pricier, we did not know it would be to this level for some of you. There could be packing inefficiencies with especially small and large orders that could be leading to higher shipping charges to the best of our knowledge. We've spent last night spot-checking and pulling some of the more pricey charges to bring to our fulfillment house to see exactly how these charges are being calculated. If there is any part of these charges that does not seem correct to us, we will let you know and have these charges re-evaluated, likely pushing back our lock date.

There is a chance that these charges are correct and this is just the state of mass distribution. If that is the case, Loren and the distribution team plan to come up with a solution to help us stand with our backers.

We can assume that they will not be able to get back to us until after Easter weekend, where we should have a statement that I will post here updating all of you about the re-evaluation.

-----------

Address Changes

We've been notified by a wonderful member of our Discord that backers may be able to change their state in BackerKit. While we do not currently have a way to open the state field for backers within the project, you may be able to solve it independently.

If you are having issues changing your state, please try going to your account information in BackerKit by going to "My BackerKit" and changing your address information in your profile. If this worked, you should be able to see the change reflected in your Mercenaries order page. If this works please let us know down here in the comments!“

$960 shipping for me.... yikes.

chaos0xomega wrote:
$960 shipping for me.... yikes.

Crikey that's insane! How big was your pledge?

£155 to pay for me in the UK on a £300 pledge. This is bloody crazy.

$210 shipping on a $750 pledge (including $225 in complimentary credit from the dice snafu in the last kickstarter). To California. Absolutely ridiculous.

Actually, I’m coming around to the idea that Catalysts partner either don’t know how local shipping works, or are trying to strong arm Catalyst.

Royal Mail standard delivery for a 20kg box of a decent size is only £10. Not sure how they make it add up to over £50.

Oh well. Let’s see what comes through after the long weekend.

U.S. shipping charges are coming through. For my Company pledge w/ an extra Blood Asp and Challenge Coin my shipping is $44.66 with 6% sales tax.

I hope that the numbers are just a mistake because somebody calculated shipping using the US for everybody instead of the local hubs promised in the KS.

Another option being discussed around on my Discord is that precisely the arrangements with the EU hub broke, and that's why the sudden increase in shipping, but that doesn't explain why folks in Canada, and the US are hit also by the same huge crisis.

This SNAFU must be the KS curse, everything was going too smoothly.

M.

I live in the dead middle of the U.S. and my S&H shows as $545......lmao, get bent.

I hope they are looking into it or they can refund my $1500.

I would have backed anyways, but on hindsight seems weird that Catalyst waited until almost the last moment to tie down the contracts to ship the KS. For Example Archon's KS has some estimates that puts the heaviest pledge (28kg) at 84$ from the EU to the US. As I understand it that means they wents and asked someone for estimated
prices.

What happened here for Catalyst not to do the same?

M.

Holy smokes, just checked my US shipping on a $275 pledge with a few add ons is $98.75 (including 'shipping tax'). Can genuinely say I would NOT have pledged had I known that.

Sounds like they did ask, and were given the numbers they presented in the KS, but no formal contracts were made as no money changed hands,

now its come time to actually pay the shipping company is providing totally different numbers

which could be them having given an underestimate in the first place (to get the business ? or from incompetenace)

or the local shipping hubs costing a lot more than expected (often eack SKU in your project increases the costs if your paying a 3rd party to deal with it, one reason why Reaper packs their KS themselves too many SKUs for deal with at a price that makes sense)

or the shipping is more expensive than expected (not sure when the KS fell in terms of the covid related shipping container crisis and the post covid, OMG the final cost of warehouse to customer door has skyrocketed)

we'll have to wait and see (and cross fingers that at least some of it is wrong)

Maybe they could invest some of the $6m they made in extra backerkit pledging after the campaign completed to ease the burden a bit.

I wonder if the high price is including picking and packing not just the shipping and the firm is either super expensive on that or not geared up for it normally and thus are charging through the roof because its a new thing for them and costing them more.

It would explain why some of the charges are insanely high if everyone is being charged a big percentage to cover the PP

Whatever happens this is something they really should fix (and honestly shoudl have fixed before people got to see those numbers). It's the kind of thing that makes everyone run to their banks to cancel!

Thankfully with my pledge, even with tax and expensive postage it’s still a slightly better deal on a per-forcepack basis than retail of the current forcepacks, and then There is a bunch of things like dice and map sheets making it bit better again. However there are some truly ridiculous numbers coming out here.

As far as I know they are using the same logistics company than the Clan KS. Did they wait until last posible moment to lock prices thinking they would go down instead of sign a contract at higher rates last year?

M.

$400 in shipping fees and taxes.

I could see $100-$150 given how big my pledge is, but holy gak that’s 40% of my total pledge to ship CONUS. You can get actual freight shipped for less.

I'm curious as to where the "Shipping Tax" is coming from.

I've never been taxed to ship anything in the U.S.

This was posted on the BattleTech Forums:

Well I run a business out of Nebraska. I ship, and have stuff shipped to customers, all the time and have *never* seen, paid, been charged, or heard of Shipping Tax.

[Edit] Although I'll pay this "Shipping Tax" over the S&H in exchange. Over $500 for S&H... get fethed.

I'm in a state where shipping is not taxable, and I see it's been added to my order. Like others I've never heard or read about this before. Strikes me as fishy.

Same here, almost $3 shipping tax...to California. Sales tax, sure, I have to pay sales tax on any online order. Amazon, Ebay, Miniature Market, even international orders. But a $2.96 shipping tax is a first

**Edit** On 2nd thought, I can't really be mad as they gave me $50 free credit from the 1st KS even though I was completely satisfied with what I received from Clan Invasion. If I hadn't spent it on an Alpha Strike hardcover then I would have had free shipping, as it is I still have a bit of credit towards shipping. I'll wait a few days to see if they get rid of the shipping tax, but generally I think I lucked out. Really sucks for many of the other backers though, people are reporting owing hundreds of dollars in shipping even for continental US orders. Zend is correct upthread where he said ACTUAL freight shipping would be cheaper

Do you guys see your VAT and shipping cost on the KS page? Also, wasn't Catalyst supposed to use some EU hubs for EU shipments? On my information page I still have nothing on the shipping cost.

You need to go into your backerkit page. They sent a link recently (mine was lest Tuesday) for confirming your address. If you click through then it takes you to the taxes and postage page.

My shipping is 84 on a 400 dollar total, shipping to the upper north center of the US. There are 13 force packs, the box set, and a fair number of salvage packs…..so it is a fairly big box. I just shipped a box of about half the size from Minnesota to Florida using the cheapest USPS option and it was 40 bucks, so the shipping in my case isn’t too far from what I was expecting.

That said, when you use large scale distribution you usually receive a price break as opposed to an individual walking into the local post and shipping a single package. Also there are some people I have seen posting truly obscene numbers that on pledges smaller than mine.