{"id":5306,"date":"2017-05-30T11:28:26","date_gmt":"2017-05-30T18:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backerkit.com\/blog\/guides\/post-campaign-guide\/dealing-with-failed-payments\/chapter-4-planning-for-pre-orders\/"},"modified":"2021-04-15T07:08:19","modified_gmt":"2021-04-15T14:08:19","slug":"chapter-4-planning-for-pre-orders","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.backerkit.com\/blog\/guides\/post-campaign-guide\/chapter-4-planning-for-pre-orders\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 4: Planning for Pre-Orders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Which pre-order platform is right for you? As a creator, your decision will be influenced by a number of factors such as the setup of your campaign, your crowdfunding platform, possibilities for software integration, platform fees, as well as personal preferences for customization, layout and design. You should also consider whether your chosen pre-order platform is easy to set up, and can be integrated with other apps.<\/span><\/p>\n

BackerKit<\/span>, <\/span>Shopify<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>Indiegogo InDemand<\/span><\/a> are three popular avenues for selling pre-orders (also known as late pledges), each with its own set of unique strengths. Read on to find out which one is right for your project.<\/span><\/p>\n

BackerKit<\/span><\/h2>\n

BackerKit\u2019s hosted pre-order stores are specifically designed for crowdfunding campaign creators. Creators that use BackerKit to survey backers and sell add-ons can easily enable a hosted pre-order store for late pledges. It lets creators sell pre-orders as soon as their campaign ends with minimal setup hassle.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another major benefit besides ease of setup is that creators can use BackerKit to process all pre-order backers at the same time as their campaign backers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Creators can host their stores directly on BackerKit or embed a pre-order widget directly onto a product website to sell directly to customers. Other features include coupon code support, Stripe and PayPal payment integration for credit card purchases, and flexible shipping fee options that allow creators to set free shipping, flat-rate shipping, or custom shipping fees based on location.<\/span><\/p>\n

David Robert, creator of the MSK-1 Knife, used BackerKit to host pre-orders once his campaign on Kickstarter ended. His campaign on BackerKit raised $173,261, nearly the same amount as his original Kickstarter campaign. \u201cDoing a direct link from Kickstarter over to our pre-order page was so seamless,\u201d Robert says. \u201cI have people who have pre-ordered who didn\u2019t even realize they\u2019d been transferred to a different platform.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He says that using BackerKit as a platform for pre-orders suited the needs of his project, which had a particularly complex reward structure.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBackerKit does such a job of taking multiple SKUs and combining them into packages. That gave me the flexibility to offer so many different packages, and that\u2019s fairly hard to pull off on some of the other online store applications.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some creators have raised more in BackerKit pre-order sales than their original campaign. The creators of <\/span>Friday the 13th<\/span><\/a>, a multiplayer video game, raised $823,704 from 12,218 backers on <\/span>Kickstarter<\/span><\/a>, exceeding their funding goal by about $100,000. In BackerKit, they amassed $1.36 million from pre-order sales in BackerKit alone. Meanwhile, the <\/span>runScribe<\/span><\/a> raised $257,294 in its Kickstarter campaign and $18,814 in BackerKit pre-order sales.<\/span>
\nBackerKit offers <\/span>three plans<\/span><\/a> for creators. Pre-orders are included in all pricing plans.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shopify<\/span><\/h2>\n

Shopify is a popular e-commerce platform that can be integrated with your Kickstarter campaign as well as BackerKit. Shopify isn\u2019t tailor-made for crowdfunding campaigns, but it has many features that will appeal to creators that need to have an e-commerce store for ongoing business. Many creators will launch a Shopify store after shipping out campaign rewards and BackerKit pre-orders.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rockwell Razors\u2019 founder Gareth Everard used Shopify after orders for the Rockwell 6S campaign had been shipped with BackerKit. It seemed a strong fit for his plans to shift Rockwell Razors from the pre-order phase to a permanent e-commerce store.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe sold out the entire first production round,\u201d he said. \u201cWe already finished our orders in BackerKit and wanted to move towards being a regular e-commerce store.\u201d Everard says one of the most appealing features of Shopify is that you can set up a <\/span>store<\/span><\/a> with the domain name of your choice.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis was the point where we moved to <\/span>rockwellrazors.com<\/span><\/a> as our URL on our Shopify store, just to make it a more cohesive experience for customers.\u201d He also cited the strength of its support infrastructure, its ease of use, its built-in analytics software, and its integration with a large app ecosystem as key strengths.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shopify has three <\/span>pricing plans<\/span><\/a> ranging from $29\/month to $299\/month.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indiegogo InDemand<\/span><\/h2>\n

Indiegogo\u2019s <\/span>InDemand<\/span><\/a> allows creators to raise funds after their initial crowdfunding campaign has concluded. It can be used by creators regardless of what platform they used for their crowdfunding campaign.<\/span><\/p>\n

Arthur Maitre, digital manager at Native Union, says \u201cthere was still quite a bit of interest\u201d for the products in the hours and days after the Kickstarter campaign for the ECLIPSE cable had ended. The Native Union website saw a huge spike in traffic in the last two hours of the campaign and received many emails from people who had missed out on contributing while the Kickstarter was still live.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe needed a platform for people to be able to pre-order the ECLIPSE so they\u2019re the second group of people to get it after the Kickstarter backers and before the product goes to market,\u201d Maitre says. So, the company chose to use Indiegogo\u2019s InDemand, which allows creators to raise money for an indefinite period once a crowdfunding campaign has run its course.<\/span><\/p>\n

The amount of money raised through pre-order sales on InDemand varies across projects. The campaign for the EcoQube C raised $375,058 on Kickstarter and $44,825 through InDemand pre-orders (10.7% of all funds raised). Meanwhile, the Airbolt: Truly Smart Travel Lock raised $202,306 on <\/span>Kickstarter<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>and $81,276 on its InDemand campaign, which comprised 28.7% of total funds raised. The campaign for the Trunkster raised $1,395,370 on Kickstarter and an additional $110,895 in InDemand (7.4% of total funds raised).<\/span><\/p>\n

Platform fees for InDemand are 5% if you ran your campaign on Indiegogo, 8% if you ran your original campaign on another platform such as Kickstarter. and higher than 8% if you bring your project over from another platform and receive additional support from the Indiegogo team.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mixing Platforms<\/span><\/h2>\n

Sometimes, creators might choose to use one platform for pre-orders and a different one for pledge management and add-ons. Chris Muscarella, the creator of the Field Skillet, says a platform\u2019s aesthetics and design can influence the marketing your product. He used BackerKit for fulfillment and Celery (recently acquired by Indiegogo) for pre-orders.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to run a campaign that felt organic and respectful of all of the backers who were going to help us make this thing a reality, which meant being turned off by other platforms that felt more aggressively commercial,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe used BackerKit for managing fulfillment and add-on sales to our existing backers, and then we used Celery for additional pre-orders and add-ons on our own site,\u201d he says. \u201cWe chose BackerKit because of the team and the support, which has been generally excellent. We chose Celery because it had a simple flow that wouldn\u2019t confuse people and was very fast to configure.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

At the end of the day, the platform you choose is less important than what you do to market your pre-order store. Ramping up your <\/span>promotional and marketing efforts<\/span> will play a significant role in making sure your pre-order store is a success.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Which pre-order platform is right for you? As a creator, your decision will be influenced by a number of factors such as the setup of your campaign, your crowdfunding platform, possibilities for software integration, platform fees, as well as personal preferences for customization, layout and design. 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