Legally and practically speaking, it's not a store because it is instead a marketplace. If we were talking about a flea market, Kickstarter would be the company

Legally and practically speaking, it's not a store because it is instead a marketplace. If we were talking about a flea market, Kickstarter would be the company that rents out spots, not the guy selling you a shady DVD. It might be possible to set up something like a store using Kickstarter, and then to defraud people who participate. If I promise to try to build you a smartwatch and I was always planning to send you a brick wrapped in tinfoil, I've probably committed civil and criminal fraud. The court won't much care whether it's a "store," only whether I lied to get the money. But that's on me, not on Kickstarter -- federal law says that online marketplaces aren't (necessarily) liable for fraud. See the unsuccessful lawsuits against eBay, Google AdSense, and Orbitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act#False_information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati... It's certainly possible for an online marketplace to become party to fraud if it's sufficiently involved, and I have no idea where that line is drawn. I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice. That citation above could be totally wrong and those cases were probably made up by rogue Wikipedia editors. Your intuitions will be closer, though, if you think of Kickstarter as the marketplace rather than the store. (As a side note, let me repeat that the law doesn't care whether it's a "store"; the question is whether people are being misled about the relevant facts when they decide to put money down. When people say "Kickstarter is a store," the legal argument would probably be "projects hosted on Kickstarter tend to mislead people who contribute money about the nature of the transaction, and the website's design encourages that." I know legal definitions aren't everything, but good ones tend to be handy even in non-legal settings, because they strip away hard-to-define words like "store" and replace them with easy-to-define words like "transaction" and "website".)