Both Crowdfunding and E-commerce industries have grown exponentially over the past 10 years. They are now becoming more closely related as leading Crowdfunding platforms are beginning to realize the potential of combining capabilities of Crowdfunding and E-commerce on one platform.
Once a new product has been successfully funded on a Crowdfunding platform, the company will have their site running, as well as selling the product. What if you could purchase the product from the Crowdfunding platform like you would on E-commerce stores such as Amazon? This can be powerful for both the Crowdfunding platform as well as for the successful campaign. The platform can continue to generate the company more sales as it would continue to expose the product to new users. The platform could also take a cut from the sale of the product. It could be a useful strategy for both parties involved.
Big Crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo have started to adopt the E-commerce capabilities. The new Indiegogo marketplace is the platforms extension for E-commerce capabilities. You can now purchase successfully Crowdfunded products, with guaranteed shipping. Companies also have the option of selling their product on the marketplace, as a means to access all of the Indiegogo users.
This could be a major change for both industries as it can give the owner of the Crowdfunding portals the opportunity to run a Crowdfunding and E-commerce platform all in one to satisfy the users of that particular niche. Portal admins could run a successful E-commerce business while helping those Crowdfund for new projects.
For those who already own a Crowdfunding portal, and would consider the use of E-commerce capabilities, note that Thrinacia will be providing this solution in the near future.
There are alternative solutions though, as you can use Celery, which is a pre-order platform. Much like Crowdfunding, it focuses on the presales of a product while Celery will take a 2% transaction fee on each purchase. In addition, if you already own a Shopify E-commerce store, you can use a pre-order app called Pre-Order Manager.
As you can see there are alternative solutions around, but there is yet to be a fully white-label Crowdfunding and E-commerce solution.