Put in a support ticket but the answer missed the point. I understand shipping product needs to be protected BUT card decks only can easily be protected from damage, far easier than boxed games. Two decks certainly do not need a kilo of packaging and the shipping costs from 5 x their weight as opposed to double weight.

"Well we actually have to do it. Anything going outside France and especially outside EU is often really damaged during transport. We change this especially after cutomer care request including destroyed product after shipping."

To me this means they do not want to create a separate packaging option for card decks only. Many companies ship card decks from France to UK,RoS securely with far less packaging than the 1 kilo we have to use with DPG. Royal Mail offers std boxes far lighter plus some "packing nuts"/bubble wrap, fairly confident French postal services have the same options.

No need to be snarky.

It's pretty obvious that you need different amounts and types of packing material to adequately protect a single deck of cards, vs a single punchboard, vs a ream of punchboards, vs a whole stack of storage boxes.

Punchboards can suffer crushing and other damage that cards would typically survive. This is obvious even from DPG's own packaging – decks of cards are just tossed in the box and are fine. Punchboards are packed tighter and still sometimes come with corner dings.

Obviously it would be possible to ship a deck with much less packaging than a large order. If you were pricing that out individually you could almost certainly find cheaper ways to ship a deck, even overseas.

The problem is probably that it makes the shipping cost too complicated to calculate. For it to be fully accurate they'd have to be accounting for the dimensions of each item and each box size and constraints about how things get stacked. By estimating a flat weight for the packaging they make it easy for you to understand how much you'll be charged for shipping, and whether you can sneak one more item into your order without bumping to the next shipping tier.

It means they probably over-charge a bit on shipping for some smaller orders, and under-charge on other orders. I'm sure lots of stores do the same thing. But for domestic shipping the cost is small, so the estimation error is small, and you don't tend to notice it. For international shipping the cost is higher, so the discrepancy is more obvious.

They could probably add some custom behavior for individual decks of cards if they wanted. But remember a few things:

* The individual decks differ in card count, which means both the size and weight vary slightly. (SoN conversion deck has 30 cards, Commonwealth deck has 64 cards and a mini punchboard, the others are in between.) So even just "accurate shipping for decks" is a bit complicated – how many of each exactly fit in an envelope of a certain size? What about the various combinations?

* These are mostly upgrade decks, probably available for a limited time. Eventually they'll go away, and any custom shipping stuff they add will have been ultimately pointless.

* It costs DPG some minimum amount of time and packing material and whatnot to prepare each order. They're willing to send small orders (there's no minimum order size), but it's more efficient for them to send out one order of ten items than to send out ten orders of one item. So there's not a lot of incentive from a business / profit perspective for them to spend resources trying to make it cheaper to place really tiny orders. It's much more efficient for them if you wait and add a deck of cards onto your next pledge manager, rather than ordering the cards on their own today.

* They're working on re-opening their US location, which will should drastically reduce the shipping costs to a good percentage of their customers. Obviously that won't help everybody, but it will help many. Spending resources on this will have a much bigger impact than making the shipping calculator more complicated would.

"No need to be snarky" was directed at Nostradunwhich; not at you. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

They don't actually use 1000g of packaging for everything; that's just the estimate that's used for shipping costs. They use appropriately sized packaging. Your invoice should show you the actual weight of the package and the actual shipping cost paid. I don't know that it would actually be an envelope, but maybe a tiny box.

That's part of why people were pushing them to update the overall shipping estimates – it was clear that the estimates were too high based on the actual costs that showed up on invoices, even for packages that *did* use around 1000g of packaging.

After their recent update to those prices, the price should align much better for average packages. But as mentioned before, there would still be a discrepancy for extremely large or small orders.

You're trying to imply that if you're not a shipper, you're not allowed to discuss shipping costs, which is just absurd. I'm not trying to prescribe to DPG exactly how they should handle their shipping contracts, and I don't think starman is either.

The message in Starman's posts is essentially "As a consumer, the high cost of shipping for card decks makes me not want to buy them". Starman doesn't need shipping experience to know his own opinion. He's providing his opinion to DPG so that they can incorporate it into their planing, should they choose to.

My message is essentially "As a consumer, I understand that there are reasons for the high cost of shipping for card decks. I don't think it's easy to fix directly, but I think DPG is making good efforts where it makes sense." Starman may or may not find that useful in tempering his expectations. DPG may or may not find that opinion useful in their planning.

Your message has been "Your opinions are invalid because you don't ship things in France. Nothing can be improved until a customer who does ship things in France chimes in", which doesn't help anybody.

If DPG finds that decks don't sell as well as they hoped, now they have some input to look at; maybe it helps. If decks are selling really well already, maybe they'll ignore it. Either way it seems better to give the feedback constructively rather than remaining silently disgruntled.

I was quoting from the basket prices at the payment stage and it showed the packaging/shipment weight and costs. In fact weight is less than 500gm(240gm) but shipping is €2.50 more than my zone on the new shipping, it kept the high estimate €18 at final payment stage for €12.32 decks. It was a test and really wanted some extra decks but not sure.

TBH they should have added the 2.0 decks to the BRO KS as most of us have SON/COMMENWEALTH, I asked they said no, yet they had addons in the PM. Seems a kick in the teeth to customers who have supported them. More than happy for it to ship with BRO, they also said no.

"These are mostly upgrade decks, probably available for a limited time. Eventually they'll go away, and any custom shipping stuff they add will have been ultimately pointless."

This maybe true but upgrade decks are about customer service especially

when you are changing a system a lot of customers has poured €100s into. The good will is worth the effort and not pointless, well I think it is even if they don't.

Quote from starman on [28/11/2021] à 20:40

TBH they should have added the 2.0 decks to the BRO KS as most of us have SON/COMMENWEALTH, I asked they said no, yet they had addons in the PM. Seems a kick in the teeth to customers who have supported them. More than happy for it to ship with BRO, they also said no.

They said no if you were outside of the EU or US, because they had no cost effective way to get the decks to the KS fulfillment centers. The EU and US are supposed to have warehouses with the decks stored in them, because they are where DPG stores their stock for sale. Although the US location is not yet online, apparently.

Since you have dealt with all sorts of shipping issues, then surely you can understand the increase in cost to reship products multiple times? I am sure you also understand how much of an unknown (at the time of the KS pledging) shipping into the UK would have been to estimate for some not completely concrete time in the future (during KS fulfillment once the Solo system is finished development).

UK fulfillment was set up to come from a UK fulfillment center to try and minimize the cost for the backers from any tariffs or other costs. So no option for other products. Given your complaints about shipping costs from the EU warehouse to the UK for other products, it would seem to me to have been the right choice.

"UK fulfillment was set up to come from a UK fulfillment center to try and minimize the cost for the backers from any tariffs or other costs. So no option for other products. Given your complaints about shipping costs from the EU warehouse to the UK for other products, it would seem to have been the right choice."

What complaint about other products, just about decks only orders.

You turned this into far more than it was.

It is hardly hidden knowledge that the 2.0 update decks are recent additions is it? They did not exist before 2.0 and therefore DPG have very little experience if any of shipping them without the new packaging.

That is an inescapable fact.

They adopted the new shipping via Surfinmeeple because of losses and that was experience before they released 2.0 update decks in the webstore.(As per customer service responses from employees of DPG.

So it is a fact not an assumption. You are literally admitting you are making assumptions to defend against perceived assumptions which are facts.

My original point stands DPG have not considered my original request but dismisses it for whatever reason, you didn't need to aggressively defend that decision.

Not all feedback needs to be positive, critism can be constructive for future decisions, I am disappointed is not an assumption it is a fact.

Your constant deflection from my core issue is not helpful and is cringworthy at best.

Just to add an additional opinion to the discussion:

For me personally, it is very important that games and components are packaged very well.

I just received a package from DPG a few days ago and the box was quite damaged. Luckily, it seems like the products are unharmed.

The postal services handle packages pretty roughly and even card decks can get damaged.

For me as a consumer it is a lot of hassle to receive damaged products. Therefore, I really appreciate it if shops protect and package their products well.

Quote from Nostradunwhich on [28/11/2021] à 05:31

I was not being snarky. I was pointing out that DPG has actual experience with years of shipping their decks to people around the world.

I still see nothing but assumptions from people who have not sent a lot of decks through the French system internationally, so do you have any data to back up your assumptions? If you do, then it could help DPG. But untested theories are not the same thing as science.

DPG real world not your defence of some fantasy reality, as I said DPG need to control their subcontractors.

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/6568040/starman54

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/6568041/starman54