thanks! but the saas business isn't this site. more of a personal project i've been tinkering with.

Slow and steady growth through organic search + WOM. Haven't tried ads yet. Growing at $100-150 additional per month.

Crowdfunding / pre-orders is definitely part of the expected business process for HW startups to launch these days.

As the first pre-order platform, Celery has powered successes like Pebble and Boosted Boards and helped them get to the next stage of their business.

The transformation over the past few years has been unreal and today is such an exciting time to be a HW startup. We personally can't wait to see what kinds of HW companies emerge next.

Selling swag via crowdfunding is cool, but I’m surprised not more people are doing equity crowdfunding (or at least it's not as well publicized).

Given how much PR is done around big fundraising events, you would think that tech news sites would be all over any potentially hot startup closing a decent round on AngelList or FundersClub.

The checkout can be added to any page that allows you insert your own HTML/JS.

They could, but selling online is more than just collecting payments. There's order management, CRM, analytics, etc, which I think bring a lot of value to a seller.

Most sellers don't have the time or resources to pull all of that off in addition to having to focus on sales & marketing and product development.

All the sensitive card information is stored with Stripe

No connection. Just happen to have the same name.

Stripe handles this really well. We've been using them to power the payments piece for trycelery.com. No big gotchas so far based on my experience. If you wait too long to charge, you may run into an expired credit card.

I'd say the most important thing is to clearly communicate shipping/fulfillment timing to your customers, so they know what to expect.

PS: just checked out trycelery, too. Looks very cool! Since I've never run a site with preordering before, I'm not sure which features I'll need or not, but I plan to revisit your service when I get to that point in development.

Cool, exactly what I was hoping to find out. Thanks for the insight!

Glad I could help. Feel free to shoot me an email (in my HN profile) if you have any specific questions.

75% of Kickstarter funded campaigns don't ship on time (research by Ethan Mollick from UPenn). Since my money is committed, I'm not sure if that gives me comfort either :)

Personally, I feel better knowing that I won't be charged at all until the item is shipped. And in the worst case, I would request a refund or issue a chargeback if I felt the seller was being "sketchy".