Years ago I was wrong about pledge managers, and I’m still learning the full scope of my short-sightedness about them.

For the way we sell new products there’s only a few weeks at most between the launch date and shipping, so we don’t use pledge managers. But I noticed a surprising data point after the recent 5-day launch period for Wingspan Americas and Viticulture: Bordeaux.

Both products sold well on our webstore during that time: 20,260 copies of Wingspan Americas and 6,353 copies of Viticulture: Bordeaux. However, in terms of the 5-day revenue, these products comprised of only half of of webstore sales. The other half of revenue came from older products.

You read that correctly. Nearly for every dollar of a sparkly new product, customers spent another dollar on an older product. Perhaps this is to consolidate shipping (we offer $10 flat-rate shipping)? Or the new products provided a nice excuse to browse the webstore?

This is what I underestimated and misunderstood about pledge managers years ago when Backerkit originally created this extension of the campaign. My backer mentality was that I’m there for the new product–if I wanted a company’s older products, I would have already purchased them, right?

But that’s not the case. The pledge manager is just an optional, non-pushy service to customers. After all, everything is shipping from the same fulfillment centers. It’s an opportunity for discovery and shipping consolidation. And, in some cases, it’s a chance for a publisher to try to move slower-selling products.

This was also a reminder to me that having related products in stock (i.e., Wingspan and Viticulture products for the recent launch) is really important, and that requires planning at least 6 months in advance.

What do you think about this? Do you ever add products to your cart in pledge managers that you weren’t planning to buy? Are you typically happy with that choice?

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Also check out Jet Bridge, a Shopify extension that can act similarly to a pledge manager for crowdfunders who use Shopify for ongoing sales. Ben Harkins at Floodgate shared this with me after I posted this article.

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