You should be ready to order all zine and merch items by the time POs close. You should be ready to order all zine and merch items by the time POs close. Maybe you are still waiting for hard proofs for things, and that's fine, but the end of the PO period is not the first time you should be figuring out how to put things together.

Most suppliers have templates and print guidelines available for use on their site. Provide these to your merch artists before they start working. (Some cases you may have to switch suppliers last minute, in which case it can't be helped. Be sure you can work with your merch artist through any necessary adjustments, but in a pinch it would help if you could make the adjustments yourself.) Print merchandise only usually needs a 0.125" bleed all around.

If you time this right, you should receive your products in 2-3 weeks and, after inspection, start packaging them up to send out.

Account for delays when ordering around peak seasons:

• Chinese New Year (if you are ordering from Chinese or Asian suppliers)
• December (holidays, heavy mailing season, many small businesses are off or short-staffed)
• Summer (con season means you are in a queue of orders that need to be filled, especially for merch items)

Basic product ordering guidelines

• Have sample products in hand long before any orders are placed.
• If you can get hard proofs during preorder period, get them. This isn't always possible for all merch especially if you're working with international suppliers, but even getting pictures will help.
• Hard copy proofs are very important for zines. They can cost extra but they are worth doing!
• Order 5-10% extra of everything to take care of missing shipments and damaged product. Some will suggest 10-20% extra but in my experience we don't normally receive more than a 5% replacement rate. But don't expect all your merchandise to arrive in 100% perfect condition, and not all suppliers will happily replace things (unless they are extremely damaged), so give yourself room to have enough to send out, maybe ask your supplier to give you a partial refund, and move on.

As you plan and budget for your zine, you should start thinking about what kind of protective packaging you'll need to take into account. For the zine itself, I think the most standard set of packing materials should be:

• poly bubble mailer (regular mailers don't protect zines enough, and paper mailers may not be enough protection against rain/mud)
• cardboard backing (helps keep the zine from bending, as well as protects the zine cover from getting dented by merch like charms or pins)
• "Do Not Bend" stickers
• polybag for the zine itself (it WILL get roughed up in transit -- even if it's inside a bubble mailer!)

The first three can even be put together while you wait for merch and zines to arrive, so you're not wasting time during the production phase.

Flat merch would fit inside the zine itself. Consider putting uneven merch items like charms and pins in protective sleeves (if your charms are large, bubble pouches will help keep them from breaking in transit) and be sure to place them on the other side of the cardboard backing, so they won't press into and dent the cover of your zine.

Note: You might have noticed, but this is a lot of plastic, and is therefore not the most sustainable thing in the world. While suppliers like RoyalMailers are quite cheap, see if you can make your budget work with a more environmentally-friendly option like EcoEnclose.

When you have to ship out 50+ zine orders, it helps to have a shipping platform that can help you manage that volume as well as give you better pricing on shipping. ShipStation is a popular tool, but a co-mod (thank you, helwolves!) discovered PirateShip and I haven't looked back since.

• It's free. Other services charge monthly based on volume but PirateShip makes money only by the margins on the shipping prices they charge, which is crazy since:
• It's cheap. Shipping is shipping -- and international shipping is expensive. But with PirateShip's Simple Export Rate program, you can actually pay less for international shipping than if you used ShipStation or Stamps.com. You just need to chat with them to activate it. (See their rates on the left.)
• It's easy and intuitive to use. Since you don't need to pay monthly to use it, just set up an account early and explore the tools. You can sync it directly with BigCartel, or import a CSV file of what you need to ship out.

Pirate Ship limitations:

• They can only email shipping notices, not delivery notices, and email personalizations are limited to name/address/order number.
• I started this as a bullet list but I honestly can't remember any other gotcha's they had.

It sounds too good to be true, but PS cuts out costs because they don't spend on advertising and rely on word of mouth. They are also set up by former Etsy sellers so they are catering specifically to small business users like zine runners.