Amazon Launchpad

Launchpad courts innovative and crowdfunded products with a curated storefront, eligibility for special merchandising placements, onboarding support, and startup-story branding. The price is a program fee layered onto normal referral and FBA costs (historically an additional ~5% of sales), with enrollment terms and periodic review.

The honest calculus: the placements and support are real but rarely transformative, and five points of margin is a heavy rake for a thin-margin hardware startup. It fits best for products whose story is the product — innovative, giftable, demo-friendly — and whose margins absorb the fee while the brand builds its own organic base.