by nomlinz » Mon Aug 19, 2019 11:01 pm
Indiegogo has been through a bunch of changes in the most recent years as they figure out how to best combat Kickstarter's continued rise in popularity and backer trust issues.
Some thoughts about Indiegogo as a platform in 2019 for entrepreneurs looking to use Indiegogo:
- they've aggressively positioned themselves as the place to launch new hardware tech products. The backers who frequent Indiegogo are more likely to support a hardware tech project. The support team behind Indiegogo is more knowledgeable about hardware tech. The information on the website is more related to hardware tech launches. Basically, if you're looking to launch hardware tech, this is the place to be.
- they've streamlined their checkout process and modeled it after other successful ecommerce sites. It used to be that if someone wants multiple products on the same Indiegogo campaign, they'd have to go through the checkout process again and again and again. Now, they've changed it up so that the backer can pre-order a "base" set of something, and click to add multiple products to their cart before checking out with a full bag of pre-orders. This is drastically increasing the AOV of each checkout.
- the Production Stage of a project is now very prominent in a campaign. Crowdfunding has gotten a bad reputation in recent years since more and more backers are being vocal about campaigns that end up not shipping products. Indiegogo is trying to combat this by showing more prominently the stage of production an item is on. Someone who is more risk averse might only want to contribute to a project that is in the production or shipping stage. On the other hand, others who are less risk averse might be completely fine contributing to a campaign that is just in the concept or prototype stage.
- the platform is now experimenting with "guaranteed shipping". To combat some more of these backer qualms about campaigns not delivering. Indiegogo is experimenting with adding "guaranteed shipping" badges to some campaigns. This means that Indiegogo will withhold all backer funds from the campaigner; campaigners will only get those funds if they ship to you within the timeframe promised. This definitely defeats the purpose of crowdfunding being used as funding a new idea, but it allows companies with funding to really find that initial group of early adopters and grow their user base before going out to the world of eCommerce. If the campaigner doesn't deliver as promised, all money gets refunded to the backer. Win-win!
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