Amazon teams up with Kickstarter to sell crowdfunded products
Amazon has announced that it is expanding its Launchpad store to include a new Kickstarter Collection featuring successful products from the crowdfunding site. From 28 July, over 300 items produced via Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns will be available for purchase under various categories on Amazon including electronics, homewares, toys, and educational resources. The new products will help Amazon on its quest to make its store different from the many online competitors, and is great news for Kickstarter users who have the funds to produce their products thanks to successful crowdfund campaigns, but may not have access to advanced, highly visible e-commerce functionality to sell them. 

3-D pens(opens in a new tab)! The Veronica Mars movie(opens in a new tab)! This weird speaker thing(opens in a new tab)! Kickstarter has brought so much joy into our lives since it founded in 2009. Now, however, products from the site will be even easier to hoard: Amazon has officially partnered with Kickstarter to bring 300 projects to the retailers crowd-funding portal, Launchpad(opens in a new tab).

“We’re thrilled to collaborate with Amazon Launchpad on creating a new path for those projects to be discovered, experienced, and loved," Kickstarter CEO and Co-Founder Yancey Strickler.

Currently, the portal mostly features gadgets, books, home goods, movies and board games. There's quite a range, from this totally inconspicuous posture fixer(opens in a new tab) featured on Shark Tank to gluten-free banana flour(opens in a new tab). Some of it looks odd, but then again, as Amazon points out, there's already a proven market for these products.

As Amazon points out, there's already a proven market for these products.

"Working with Kickstarter is a great way for us to hear directly from customers what products they care about, since they truly hold the power to bring these products to life," Amazon Vice President Jim Adkins said.

The collaboration is the next step for Amazon's Launchpad program, which debuted about a year ago. Its goal was next-level crowd-funding -- to connect interested venture capitalists with eager innovators. Since then, Amazon claims it has worked with over 100 leading venture capital firms, startup accelerators, and crowd-funding platforms, and launched more than 1,000 startups. It sure helps that they have Amazon's audience, with roughly 188 million(opens in a new tab) visitors a day.

"Our goal is to enable them to reach Amazon’s hundreds of millions of customers and to overcome one of the biggest challenges any startup faces -- bringing their product to market successfully," Adkins said.