Overseas crowd-funding refers to an overseas marketing method of launching new products on international crowd-funding platforms such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and promoting products and raising funds to global online users. Compared with platforms of other brands such as Amazon and Independent.com, overseas crowd-funding does not need to prepare goods and can use the same site at the same time. Free combination tests the global market (North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, etc.), so whether it is for 0-1 start-up brands or mature overseas brands to test new categories and markets, it is a way with low start-up cost and high input-output.
Before the project goes online, it is usually packaged and planned by professional crowd-funding operation team. Brands (enterprises) can not only obtain corresponding project funds, but also increase brand exposure worldwide through crowd-funding platform. However, the material preparation, production and delivery of products can be completed after receiving all the funds from the crowdfunding platform, so the financial pressure and risk of the enterprise to realize the brand going abroad through overseas crowdfunding are relatively low.
Currently popular crowdfunding platforms are: Kickstarter and Indiegogo for the global market, Makuake for the Japanese market, and Zeczec for the Chinese Taiwan market.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter was founded in 2009 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler in New York, THE United States. It is the largest and most well-known fundraising platform for creative products in the world.
Kickstarter covers a wide range of creative projects, from movies, games, music, art to design, technology, smart technology, and more. The platform can be used to raise public funds for creative projects on the Internet, in order to build awareness in overseas markets. As one of the most popular platforms for supporting creative projects, Kickstarter has successfully launched more than 200,000 projects since its inception, raised more than $6 billion and has more than 20 million supporters. During january-March 2022, Kickstarter averaged more than 20 million page views per month, two to three times more than Indiegogo during the same period.
Can currently on kickstarter launched the raise of countries and regions are: the United States, Britain, Mexico, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore and Hong Kong, China, it is not including the Chinese mainland. At present, Kickstarter projects of mainland teams usually use companies in Hong Kong or the United States as the main body to launch.
Platform fee: Kickstarter charges a platform fee of 5% of the final transaction amount. Stripe, an official and exclusive payment platform, will charge a fee of around 3%. It's also worth noting that Kickstarter uses an all-or-nothing fundraising model, which means that you can only be funded if you reach your crowdfunding goal. If you don't, Funds raised for the project will be returned to the backers.
Indiegogo
Since Indiegogo was founded in 2008 by Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin and Eric Schell, Indiegogo is based in San Francisco, California. Indiegogo has launched more than 800,000 successful projects with backers from 235 countries and regions. Indiegogo averaged 7.5 million page views per month from January to March 2022.
Although the traffic is not as good as Kickstarter, Indiegogo pays more attention to Chinese brands and officially settled in China in 2018. It has a local team in China to provide customized traffic support for brands from the mainland. After four years of hard work, data in 2021 shows that, The sales volume of brands from China on Indiegogo has accounted for about 60% of the total transaction amount of the platform. However, due to the limitation of international policy, Indiegogo also does not support companies from the mainland as project subjects. Brands also need to initiate projects through Hong Kong or American companies.
Platform fees: Similar to Kickstarter rules, Indiegogo charges a 5% platform fee for all crowdfunding campaigns, while Stripe charges around 3% as a payment service.
Most notably, the sponsor can choose fixed or flexible financing targets for the project. If a flexible fundraising target is chosen, the sponsor will receive the money regardless of the ultimate success of the project.
In addition to the crowdfunding platform, Indiegogo has the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo InDemand, which allows brands to continue to sell products after crowdfunding on Indiegogo platform after completing Kickstarter or Indiegogo crowdfunding.
In addition to global crowdfunding platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Japanese crowdfunding platform Makuake and Chinese Taiwan crowdfunding platform Zeczec are also very suitable for overseas brands. Different from Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Makuake and Zeczec only require the products to be launched in Japan and Taiwan respectively. Therefore, after the end of global crowdfunding, brands with subsequent market expansion needs in Japan or Taiwan will choose to continue to launch crowdfunding on these two platforms.
Makuake
Founded in 2013, Makuake is one of the most popular crowdfunding sites in Japan. Although Makuake is not the pioneer of crowdfunding in Japan, it has found the market entrance, defined the management policy, and combined with the market resources of its parent company Rakuten, made Makuake a popular crowdfunding platform in Japan. Although it only targets the Japanese market, in the last year, Makuake's website traffic has exploded. According to statistics, Makuake's traffic from January to March 2022 has the momentum of catching up with Indiegogo, with the monthly average page view reaching 7 million times.
Makuake also covers a wide range of crowdfunding categories, including fashion, restaurants/bars, cosmetics, beauty, art, photos, movies/videos, music, games, comedy, entertainment, news, sports, etc. Currently, 80% to 90% of the products online on Makuake are from Japan, and the remaining 10% to 20% are from overseas. However, since 2020, projects from China have successfully topped the list on Makuake.
As of April 2022, seven of Makuake's top eight all-time deals were made by Chinese brands. Among them, Honbike, an emerging electric bicycle brand from Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, completed a crowdfunding project of 623,650,600 yen (31 million yuan) in 2021, setting a record on The Makuake platform.
Platform fee: The platform will take 20% of the crowdfunding amount of each crowdfunding project as the platform commission, including 5% settlement fee. If the target amount is not reached in the Alll or Nothing type, no fee is charged for the project.
Different from Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Makuake has a dedicated operation team responsible for marketing after the launch of the project. Brands need to collect seed users and search for celebrity media during the warm-up period.
Zeczec
Founded in 2011 and officially launched in February 2012, TSK TSK is the first online platform in Taiwan to realize creative dreams through crowdfunding. Regardless of the dream is a pioneering work, perform on stage since1960 and creative invention, or originality stores, can share in the TSK, also is in the form of purchase in advance, the project project type is also varied, can be a product of science and technology, pioneering work, tickets, and even a new idea and so on, the platform is committed to through the network transmission power, together create a great new things.
Tut tut is a crowdfunding platform that combines pre-order with online publicity. The types of projects allowed to be launched are similar to KS. As long as there are creative ideas, all types of crowdfunding can be launched. But unlike KS, tut initiators must provide "tangible feedback" to supporters, not just thank-you notes.
Up to now, TSK platform has accumulated more than 1.5 billion YUAN of crowdfunding, more than 2 million crowdfunding times, and more than 5,000 crowdfunding proposals. The main audience area of the platform is Taiwan, China, accounting for 92.95%, followed by Hong Kong, China. Despite the impact of THE COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which disrupted all overseas plans from partners to freight logistics, the platform's crowd-funding performance bucked the trend and reached 1.93 billion in the whole year, an increase of more than two times compared with 2019.
Platform fees: The platform will charge 8% of the crowdfunding amount as commission, which includes platform services, handling fees and rights protection fees of TSK Platform. If the crowdfunding fails, the full amount will be returned to the supporters.
According to the page views of Tut platform website, the average monthly page views from January to March in 2022 were about 1.5 million times, ranking first among the crowdfunding platforms in Taiwan. The platform not only has many members, but also has a high buyback rate. The buyback rate of more than three crowdfunding sessions is as high as 80%.
Parcelfromchina
2022.05.08
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