Pretail (also referred to as pre-tail, pre-retail, pre-launch, or pre-commerce) is a sub-category of e-commerce and online retail for introducing new products, services, and brands to market by pre-launching online, from creating an interest waitlist of signups before launch to collecting reservations or pre-orders in limited quantity before release, realization, or commercial availability.
[2] Pretail includes pre-sale commerce, pre-order retailers, pre-launch marketing services, incubation marketplaces, crowdfunding communities, and demand chain management systems.
[2] Retailers today are increasingly pretailing to test, promote, and monetize consumer demand in the initial phase of the new commerce pipeline as first introduced in a 2012 Forbes article.
Pretail demand is growing in consumer retail: electronics, movies, music, video games, books, fashion, software apps, connected devices, cars, toys, cosmetics, art, events, etc.
[4] Large companies such as Amazon and Apple are pre-tailing new products to measure demand, manage supply chain market dynamics, and monetize fandom anticipation.
[5] Pretail is related to a wide variety of business areas: from product innovation (concept & ideation) and supply chain management to marketing and sales.
[6] Product development costs are pushed down, more and more people can start their own business, create goods, and provide services to broader audiences.
By being able to measure demand before mass production is started allows companies to forecast financing needed and develop inventory policy more accurately.
One of the reasons for this acquisition was the apparent public interest in this type of technology which was shown two years earlier when the campaign on Kickstarter managed to raise a total of $2.4 million when the project was still in the prototype stage.