The expensive part is shipping.

Option 1: Ship to paying customers. This is the ideal outcome.

Option 2: Ship everything back to the seller, or to a storage place, etc. Expensive because Amazon has to have labour go and retrieve it all (look up videos for how Amazon stores its items- it's madness and it's awesome). Then you need to essentially pay for one or more pallets of stuff to be shipped, which is cheaper than shipping individually, but not free.

Option 3: Destroy it all. Amazon charges you because even destroying it isn't that cheap. It's cheaper than shipping it, yes, but there's still a lot of work involved.

I think if you want to help these guys out, encourage people to buy the game.

Yeah it does suck. We're going to look exactly at how much it'll cost to ship / warehouse them vs destroy. My gut instinct is shipping + storing 5000 for the duration until they sellout would be comparable to just printing a second edition in China if demand picks up again.

Have you heard of meh.com? I'm not sure how they pick their products, but they seem like a good place to dump a pallet of unwanted goods in order to break even.

Can't you give them away? Would be some extra marketing.

Even giving them away cost's ~$6 per unit to ship them somewhere. We're looking into donating a bunch to schools / libraries / other non-profits.

Offer current buyers the option of giving a second copy to charity for an extra $5?

Charity up-sell is an interesting idea. Sort of like the popular buy-one give-one business model, but optional.

Idea: Give them away or destroy them in a spectacularly interesting way that millions of people will want to watch:

https://holidayhole.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcMDMoNu66_1Hwi5-MeiQgw/fea...

https://www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXtSlEW1XmE

Hmm. I wonder if people would tune into a GIANT POLITICAL BONFIRE.

well, i just bought a couple, so knock that problem down a couple more units...

What about selling them very very cheaply as an Amazon Add-on item?

Amazon has worse margins than our online store already. The way I see it. We can drop the price, but we still have to market it. It'd be just as much work to market a $5 as it would a $30 game.

Amazon sets "Add-on" status not the seller.

what if you sell them at a very low price point? Or does that damage the brand value?

It's reach, really. Even if we drop the price, the only people who'd will know about that are the people on our mailing list.

Getting picked up on HN really came out of the blue. It's the most people who we've been in front of since the Kickstarter campaign. You can't bank on that.

Could you do a special offer to previous buyers, offering them a second, cheaper deal which they can then gift to someone else?

Comes across as a reward for them, justifies the lower price (discount for them only), but hopefully solves your inventory/storage issue somewhat.

Funny you mention that! We have a hidden stocking stuffer deal $40 all in for 3 games. If you mined the comments then you get it too: http://thecontender.us/products/contender-holiday-secret-sur...

I have a lot of experience with FBA, feel free to email me, might be able to help.

Address is in my profile here.

It costs 50 cents per item to recall, but you sometimes can't send the same item in again for some time.

By the way, based on the rank of the items, it's selling around 50-100 units a month as of now.

I know zilch about the physical inventory world - is that $.50 something Amazon will charge?

Yes, Amazon charges 50 cents to recall an item.

Sometimes they offer free recalls (right before q4 when they wanted to clear out their warehouse, for instance), but then you usually can't send the same item in for some time.

They really don't want people using them for long term storage, they've been pushing for people to only send in inventory that will sell soon. That's why they have extra fees if you have something there past 6 months, and again past 12 months.

They also started charging extra for storage during q4 (November and December).

It's likely to add up to the printing cost pretty fast.