Once a Kickstarter campaign ends, you have to go to a creator’s page to pre-order the products — until now, that is. Today, Kickstarter announced that it is (finally!) including pre-order functionality as part of its core platform once the campaign ends. It calls the feature “delayed commits,” and the platform says it plans to make it available to all creators “soon.” Those who follow the industry will likely treat the announcement with a glance and a “welcome to the club,” as Indiegogo launched its equivalent — InDemand — nearly a decade ago.
Late to the party aside, safter beginning in 2009, Kickstarter was a pioneer in crowdfunding. The introduction of delayed commits is a welcome addition to supporting creatives. The feature opens up new avenues for backers who missed out on the original campaign, but it also simplifies the process of post-campaign contributions, making it a win-win for all parties involved — at least Kickstarter, which up until this point has seen pre-sales post- campaign to have fallen. off-site, meaning the platform was unable to deduct the usual 5% platform fee from the top. Which of course it will do for delayed commits as well.
A bit spontaneous, really.
How does it work
Once a project is successfully funded, creators can activate delayed commits from their dashboard. This adds a special ‘Late Pledges’ section to their project page where new backers can choose rewards and pledge their support at their convenience, just like in the initial phase of the campaign. A Kickstarter representative assures us that Late Pledges integrates seamlessly with the Kickstarter platform, ensuring a smooth and efficient experience for all users.
For founders, the delayed commit feature makes a lot of sense. A product’s Kickstarter page is often hugely influential on Google and often appears in the top search results. Getting people to spend money is an obvious next step. This makes late pledges a great way to leverage momentum from successful campaigns. Potential backers who discover the project later can continue to participate and secure their desired rewards without waiting for a separate pre-order campaign. Creators can also offer exclusive rewards or limited-time incentives to attract additional support, maintaining excitement and exposure for their projects.
However, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns: Crowdfunding campaigns can be extremely difficult to deliver in some cases, and there’s often a period after the campaign when the real gets really real and the build and design challenges start to emerge. Continuing to take pre-orders at this stage could represent a risk: managing an increased volume of backers, fulfilling rewards and potentially affecting the initial urgency that drives many crowdfunding campaigns. Additionally, creators may need to carefully consider the timing and length of the late pledge period to avoid diminishing the impact of their original campaign.
Despite the potential challenges, the delayed pledge feature offers significant benefits to Kickstarter creators. Backers get more flexibility and the opportunity to back projects they might have missed out on initially. It’s also easy to imagine a world where the feature could contribute to a more sustainable crowdfunding environment by allowing projects to generate ongoing support.
It will be interesting to see where Kickstarter takes the feature in the future — it’s easy to imagine the platform introducing improvements like time-limited pledge windows or integration with other platform features to boost project visibility and success. The evolution of this feature could lead to broader changes in Kickstarter’s strategy, emphasizing long-term creator-backer relationships and expanding support tools for creators.
If you want to see what it looks like, Kickstarter has enabled the functionality in the recently concluded Master of Realms campaign.
