Earlier this week, Amazon opened a store page for Kickstarter projects so that people can have an easier time searching for projects which came to be thanks to the most popular crowdfunding website on the planet. The page currently lists more than 300 various products, ranging from books and movies to games and gadgets. Furthermore, a brand new Kickstarter Collection can now be seen on the front page of Amazon Launchpad, the online retailer’s program for showcasing unique creations made by startups. That initiative launched in 2015 and introduced over 200 products, many of which were created thanks to successful Kickstarter campaigns. Today, Amazon boasts the fact that over 1,000 startups have now started selling products through Launchpad.
The company’s vice president Jim Adkinson stated that Launchpad was primarily designed as a service for innovators, inventors, and creative startups in general. The idea behind the program was to help startups “to overcome one of the biggest challenges” they can face – successfully introducing their product to the market, reaching their target audience and letting it know their product exists and is available for purchase. In that sense, this Amazon page solely dedicated to Kickstarter projects seems like an extension of that policy and another one of Amazon’s attempts to help startups sell their products. Naturally, and take a respectable chunk of those sales in the process.
This newly opened Kickstarter page also acts as confirmation that Amazon is still very much focused on its core business, i.e. online retail. Given the numerous business strategy criticism the company faced in recent months, it’s definitely important that Amazon makes a clear statement of being more aggressive when it comes to its bread and butter. Constantly improving its online store with new features and facilitating the process of commercially launching new products for innovative startups with a lot of potential is definitely something that can easily pay off in the very near future. A richer selection of products could also lead to a larger number of Amazon Prime subscribers which Amazon’s senior VP of devices David Limp recently described as “lower than expected.” In any case, time will tell what Amazon has in store next for innovative startups.