Indiegogo offers refunds for (some) products that never ship

Crowdfunding is usually understood as a “spend your money, take your chances” proposal. But more and more reputable companies are using it as a platform to launch regular products, making the crowdfunding campaign more of a PR move than an actual necessity for raising funds. Indiegogo, no stranger to these campaigns, is offering a more solid guarantee to backers that they’ll have a refund option.

Indiegogo’s Shipping Guarantee Program is a higher standard than your garden variety crowdfunding campaign, and it won’t be available to everyone. In order to qualify you have to “have a proven track record of successful crowdfunding on Indiegogo” and your product must be “in the final manufacturing stages.” So yeah, this is designed for companies that are using Indiegogo as a promotional tool, not as a means of getting necessary funds for making a device.

You might say these standards are probably out of the reach of anyone who considers themselves an “indie.” The Lofree Edge in the header image is from a reputable company, it did ship to backers, and you can buy it outside of Indiegogo right now.

But those campaigns that apply and qualify will get the Shipping Guarantee badge to place on their Indiegogo pages. That’ll tell backers that they can get a full refund of their pledge money if the product doesn’t ship on time. The UI for campaigns that are accepted into the program tells backers right on the page, “Ships by [date] or your money back.”

The actual utility of the system seems minimal, since the requirements mean that the only campaigns eligible will be from companies that are already fairly reputable and frequently use Indiegogo for new launches, like portable game device manufacturer GPD. These companies already have a system in place to give them extra credence — you can see a “Trust Team Proven” badge on GPD’s campaign for the WIN Mini 2024, for example.

But I suppose any extra peace of mind is worth it, since crowdfunding remains a daunting proposal more than a decade after it’s become commonplace. Nobody wants to see hundreds of dollars poof into nothing…which has happened often enough.