Kickstarter is often basically a group buy. Project owners make MVPs and market/pitch it, get funding from the public, and then commission a large batch run.
A group buy is when you want to buy a bunch of existing product at wholesaler prices. Kickstarter is about funding new project that don’t exist yet. Like if the wholesaler refuses to sell you 1000 video cards, just give the money back. If you spend the Kickstarter money and can’t land a product there isn’t much you can do for refunds.
It's both, I think, depending on the conventions around the thing being group-bought.
What you describe is unquestionably a group buy, but in, for example, the mechanical keyboards community, a "group buy" is paying the designer of a thing (keyboard, keycap set, etc.) for the expense of third-party production up front. It's really more of a preorder that requires a certain volume to proceed. But regardless, they're called group buys in that hobby.
(With expected mixed results, I should add -- plenty of keyboard "group buys" never come to fruition, and since they're not backed by a Kickstarter-like platform, the money is just gone. The /r/mechanicalkeyboards subreddit has many such stories.)
Hah I was recently looking at that subreddit and yeah that’s why I don’t like the idea of that kind of group buy. It’s a gamble on everything working out and everyone doing the right things. I also would argue that requesting a known designer/manufacturer to make N of a specific item is different than asking an unknown designer to do so for the first time. Terminology aside, this is my original point: that is a risky way of doing things and communicates to the consumer that the product is unlikely to just get made and be available.
Absolutely. If one was uncharitable, one might suggest the reason that some of those group-buy-powered companies run their own storefront instead of Kickstarter is so that their customers associate them with "buying" and not with "funding".
