Pitney Bowes Partners On X-Border Shipping

They just don’t make consumer products like they used to. No, literally, the option for a startup to crowdfund its concepts through Kickstarter has actually changed the way new products go from prototypes to market releases. Come launch day, though, those crowdfunded efforts have to navigate the complex world of cross-border commerce. But, increasingly, they’re not going it alone.

Global eCommerce support provider Pitney Bowes and logistics firm ShipCenter announced on Thursday (April 28) that they had partnered to offer specialized shipping solutions to Kickstarter inventors that need to send their finished products to backers around the globe. In addition to discounted international rates, Kickstarter creators will also be able to see the upfront costs of their packages, which Pitney Bowes President of Global eCommerce Lila Snyder praised as a welcome addition to an intricately expanding international shipping industry.

“We are thrilled to be collaborating with ShipCenter to provide Kickstarter creators with a solution that can help simplify the complexities of international shipping so they can easily send rewards to their backers around the world,” Snyder said in a statement. “This is the first time our global eCommerce software and shipping services are being leveraged outside of the retail industry, and we look forward to delivering a rich, end-to-end, cross-border shipping experience.”

Pitney Bowes and ShipCenter have certainly done the work to make deliveries as low-stress as possible for successful Kickstarter projects. All creators need to do is email a list of backers to ShipCenter, which automatically generates shipping labels and invoices and schedules pickup windows. That ease of use when shipping internationally could soon become essential to the R&D-focused minds behind Kickstarter projects, because, with cumulative pledged funding topping $2.3 billion as of April 2016, there might not be much time outside of product testing and fine tuning for them to worry about finding the best deal on cross-border logistics.