Warranties and return policies for crowdfunded items & pre-orders?

HW Startups
#1

We’ve crowdfunded and we are pre-selling but we haven’t started shipping yet. We’ve been getting questions about warranty and return policy.

What have people generally done/seen for crowdfunded/startup hardware? I haven’t really seen other campaigns discuss this up front, usually it seems to be something that people post only after they’ve been shipping for a while.

We want to give these people a reasonable answer, but also don’t want to lock ourselves into anything unreasonable.

#2

Crowdfunding changes things, but there are all kinds of consumer production laws that require ODMs handle warranties and returns in a certain way unless the sale is described as “final”. Also, the state of CA is particularly strict on this stuff. Although, technically, none of this applies because crowdfunding is not a “sale” it’s a “donation”.

That being said: a 30 day return policy and 90 day warranty support against defects seems like the minimally right thing to do.