What is Crowdsourcing? How Brands Harness the Crowd in 2025

For e-commerce brands and Amazon sellers, staying competitive often means finding innovative, cost-effective ways to create content and solutions. One strategy gaining traction is crowdsourcing. But what is crowdsourcing, exactly, and how can it help your business thrive? In simple terms, crowdsourcing means tapping into the power of a crowd – often your customers, fans, or an online community – to contribute ideas, content, or expertise. This article breaks down what crowdsourcing is and explores how brands in 2025 are using it to gather user-generated content (UGC), collaborate with micro influencers, and boost engagement and sales.

What is Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is the practice of collecting services, ideas, or content from a large group of people (the “crowd”), typically via the internet. Unlike outsourcing a task to a single vendor, crowdsourcing broadcasts an open call to the public or a community to help solve a problem or complete a project. The contributors are usually third parties outside your organization – for example, your customers or freelance creators – rather than your employees. The term itself is a portmanteau of “crowd” and “outsourcing,” coined in 2006 to describe businesses leveraging the internet to outsource work to the crowd.

It’s important to note that crowdsourcing is not the same as crowdfunding. While crowdsourcing seeks ideas, information or labor from a group of people, crowdfunding solicits money or financial contributions from the crowd. In other words, if you’re asking the public for creative input or micro-tasks, you’re crowdsourcing – if you’re asking them to back your product with donations or investments, you’re crowdfunding.

How does crowdsourcing work? In practice, a company sets out an open call or challenge, and interested individuals contribute their entries or efforts. Thanks to digital platforms and social media, reaching a large distributed crowd is easier than ever. For example, a business might invite its followers to submit designs for a new logo, then reward and adopt the best submission. Major brands have embraced this approach. Starbucks famously asked customers to create artwork on their coffee cups and vote for their favorite design, resulting in a fan-designed limited-edition cup sold in stores. Similarly, Lay’s “Do Us a Flavor” campaign invited the public to invent new potato chip flavors; the winning fan-created flavors were produced and sold nationally, generating both innovative product ideas and massive consumer buzz. In each case, the brand leveraged its crowd of fans and consumers to generate fresh ideas and content, effectively letting the community co-create the product or marketing content.

Benefits of Crowdsourcing for Brands

Why are businesses – from lean Amazon sellers to big-name retailers – turning to crowdsourcing? The appeal lies in its ability to deliver results that are efficient, creative, and community-driven. Here are some key benefits of crowdsourcing for brands in 2025:

• • Cost and time savings: Crowdsourcing can be a budget-friendly way to get work done quickly. By breaking a large task into smaller pieces for a crowd to tackle, a company can accomplish in hours what might take an in-house team weeks. This efficiency allows e-commerce startups and sellers to save money and scale up faster than if they hired full-time staff for every project.

     

  • Diverse ideas and innovation: Tapping a broad, diverse group of people leads to more out-of-the-box thinking. You’ll receive perspectives and ideas that your internal team may never have considered. This diversity spurs innovation – whether it’s new product features, creative marketing angles, or solutions to tricky problems. Involving a wider community essentially accesses the “wisdom of the crowd” to drive your business forward.

     

  • Higher customer engagement and loyalty: When you involve customers in your process – like voting on a new product or creating content – you show them that you value their opinion. Naturally, people become more invested in your brand. Crowdsourcing makes customers feel like part of the story, leading to stronger engagement and loyalty. They’re not just buyers anymore; they’re contributors. An engaged customer base that helped shape a campaign or product is more likely to stick around and advocate for it.

     

  • New brand advocates (word-of-mouth marketing): A successful crowdsourcing initiative can turn enthusiastic participants into brand ambassadors. When someone contributes ideas or content and has a positive experience, they’re likely to share it with friends or on social media. Those contributors become authentic ambassadors spreading the word about your brand. In essence, crowdsourcing can ignite word-of-mouth marketing, as your crowd feels a sense of ownership and pride in what they helped create.

In short, crowdsourcing lets you accomplish more with less by leveraging the crowd’s collective talent and passion. You gain fresh content and solutions, while participants gain a sense of community and recognition. It’s a win-win that particularly suits today’s fast-moving e-commerce environment, where creativity and authenticity drive success.

How to Leverage Crowdsourcing in Your Strategy

Knowing the benefits, how can your brand actually put crowdsourcing into action? Below are several ways e-commerce brands and Amazon sellers can leverage crowdsourcing in marketing and product development. These approaches will help you gather valuable user-generated content, amplify your reach through influencers, and make customers active partners in your growth.

1. Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC) from Customers

One of the easiest ways to start crowdsourcing is by encouraging your customers to create content related to your brand. User-generated content (UGC) includes things like customer reviews, photos, unboxing videos, social media posts, or testimonials – essentially, any content created by users rather than by your company. UGC is like digital word-of-mouth, and it carries a lot of weight. In fact, 92% of consumers trust the authenticity of UGC (real customer stories and images) more than traditional advertising. Campaigns that incorporate UGC have seen conversion rates increase by roughly 29% on average, showing that real customer content isn’t just fluff – it drives sales.

To crowdsource UGC, invite your customers to share their experiences. For example, you might create a branded hashtag challenge on Instagram or TikTok asking customers to post photos or videos using your product. Many e-commerce brands run contests or giveaways to incentivize UGC: “Share a photo of you using our product for a chance to be featured or win a prize!” Not only do you get a stream of authentic content to repost (with permission) on your own channels, but participants feel more connected to your brand.

Reviews and customer Q&A are another vital form of UGC. Encourage buyers to leave reviews on product pages and respond to their feedback. Glowing reviews, as well as constructive ones, provide social proof to new shoppers. Amazon sellers, for instance, rely heavily on review content – and even the customer questions & answers section on Amazon is essentially crowdsourced customer support. Future customers often trust these peer responses to make purchase decisions. By actively engaging and maybe gently prompting customers for reviews (e.g., via follow-up emails or insert cards), you can crowdsource a wealth of content that builds trust for your store. Featuring UGC on your website or in ads (such as real customer photos in your emails or product pages) further reinforces authenticity. The goal is to let your happy customers do the talking – their content and opinions will carry more credibility than any polished sales copy you could write.

2. Partner with Micro-Influencers for Scaled Authenticity

Another way to crowdsource your marketing is through micro-influencer partnerships. Micro-influencers are social media content creators who typically have between ~5,000 and 100,000 followers. They may not be celebrities, but they’ve built highly engaged niche communities around specific interests – and that makes their recommendations powerful. In influencer marketing, bigger isn’t always better: micro-influencers often boast higher engagement rates and trust with their audience than macro-influencers with millions of followers. For example, on Instagram, micro-influencers (10k–100k followers) average about a 3.8% engagement rate, whereas mega-influencers with huge followings see only around 1.2% engagement. That closer connection means a micro-influencer’s post about your product can feel as genuine as a friend’s recommendation, driving more action.

Working with micro-influencers at scale is essentially crowdsourcing your brand’s social media content and word-of-mouth. Instead of commissioning one big ad agency or paying one superstar influencer, you collaborate with dozens of smaller creators who each produce content and spread the word to their respective micro-communities. This approach is not only cost-effective (micro-influencers typically charge far less than big influencers), but it also yields a volume of diverse content – photos, videos, reviews, how-to posts – that you can reuse in your marketing. It’s like having a crowd of brand ambassadors creating and sharing stories about your products simultaneously.

To implement this, identify micro-influencers in your niche whose audiences overlap with your target customers. You can find them by researching relevant hashtags, using influencer discovery tools, or even through platforms designed for micro-influencer campaigns. (For example, Stack Influence helps brands connect with vetted micro-influencers at scale, essentially acting as a platform to crowdsource authentic product shout-outs from dozens of creators.) Reach out to these creators with a collaboration offer – often gifting a product or offering a small fee or commission in exchange for content posts. Ensure you give them creative freedom so the content remains authentic; you want their personal voice to shine through, as that’s what resonates with their followers.

By running a micro-influencer campaign, an e-commerce brand can generate a wave of UGC-like influencer content across social channels. Each micro-influencer’s post exposes your product to a trusted community and also provides you with ready-made content to share. The combined reach of 50 micro-influencers can sometimes outperform a single celebrity endorsement, and it comes with the benefit of feeling more grassroots and genuine. This crowdsourced marketing approach builds both brand awareness and credibility simultaneously.

3. Run Idea Contests and Co-Creation Campaigns

Crowdsourcing isn’t just about content; it can also drive product innovation. Many brands – big and small – have discovered the value of running idea contests to let their community co-create the next big thing. If you’re an Amazon seller or product creator, consider engaging your customer base in the product development process. For example, you might run a contest asking customers for new product ideas, feature suggestions, or even design submissions.

Some practical ways to do this include:

• • Product idea submissions: Invite customers to suggest what product you should launch next or improvements to existing products. This could be done via a simple survey, social media prompts, or a contest where the best idea wins a reward. Not only might you uncover a hit idea, but participants will be eager to buy a product they suggested if it becomes reality.

     

  • Design contests: If your business involves design elements (apparel, packaging, logos, etc.), hold a contest for user-submitted designs. For instance, a t-shirt company could ask fans to submit artwork for the next shirt and let the community vote on the winner. The winning design gets produced (often crediting the designer), and the winner might get a prize or royalties. This was how the brand Threadless built its entire business – by crowdsourcing t-shirt designs from independent artists and voting on favorites.

     

  • Voting and surveys: Even something as simple as posting two potential new flavors, styles, or features on Instagram and asking followers to vote is crowdsourcing in action. It engages your audience and guides your decisions with direct customer input. Lego, for example, operates the Lego Ideas platform where fans submit ideas for new Lego sets and vote on them; popular ideas have actually been turned into real products. Your business can emulate this on a smaller scale via social polls or community forums.

These co-creation initiatives not only yield innovative ideas straight from your target market, but they also generate excitement. Participants are likely to share the campaign with friends (“I entered this contest!” or “I voted for this idea!”), giving you extra viral marketing. Importantly, when the crowd’s idea comes to life – say you produce the winning product – those who participated feel a sense of ownership and are more inclined to support it. It’s market research, product development, and marketing all rolled into one. Just be sure to clearly define the rules (especially how you’ll use the ideas) and offer a worthwhile incentive or recognition to motivate high-quality contributions.

4. Leverage Customer Reviews and Q&A as Crowdsourced Social Proof

In e-commerce, social proof can make or break a sale. Prospective buyers want evidence that a product will meet their needs, and the most credible evidence often comes from other customers. That’s why leveraging reviews, ratings, and even customer Q&A effectively is so crucial – it’s a form of crowdsourced reassurance for new shoppers.

Reviews are essentially crowdsourced testimonials. Each review is a piece of content created by a customer, and collectively they paint a picture of your product’s quality. Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on your website or marketplace listings. You might send follow-up emails after purchase with a polite request for a review, possibly offering a small incentive like a discount on a future purchase (if platform policies allow). Highlighting snippets of positive reviews in your product descriptions or ads can also be powerful, as it shows real people endorse your product. Even negative feedback is useful if you handle it well – responding to and addressing issues publicly demonstrates transparency and responsiveness, which builds trust.

For Amazon sellers, the platform’s features inherently use crowdsourcing: the star rating summary, the written reviews, and the Customer Q&A section (where shoppers’ questions about a product are answered by other owners) all leverage the crowd’s input. Make sure to monitor your Amazon product pages’ Q&A and jump in with official answers if needed, but often you’ll find past customers answer questions accurately. This is free, authentic information that helps convince on-the-fence buyers. It’s essentially your customer base helping you sell, by sharing their experiences and knowledge.

To further leverage this, you can repurpose review content in your marketing. For example, pull user quotes for social media posts (“This gadget saved me 2 hours a day – John D.”), or create a highlight reel of customer testimonials on your website. Some brands even invite customers to submit video reviews or unboxing clips (perhaps via a contest or reward), which serve as compelling UGC for ads. Remember, content that might seem mundane to you – a quick photo of a customer using your product – can be gold for peers who want proof that the product works as advertised. By actively cultivating and showcasing these kinds of crowdsourced endorsements, you build a feedback loop: new customers are swayed by existing customers’ voices, they make a purchase, then they ideally contribute their own review or content, and the cycle continues.

Conclusion to What is Crowdsourcing

In conclusion, what is crowdsourcing for a modern e-commerce brand? It’s far more than a buzzword – it’s a strategy to harness the creativity, knowledge, and enthusiasm of the crowd to propel your business forward. From product innovation to authentic marketing content, crowdsourcing allows you to turn your customers and communities into collaborators. This approach can help even small Amazon sellers punch above their weight, by generating fresh ideas and social proof that build trust with a wider audience.

The beauty of crowdsourcing in 2025 is that digital connectivity makes it easier than ever to engage people outside your company. Whether it’s rallying micro-influencers to produce a flurry of genuine content, or inviting your own customers to shape your next product launch, you’re essentially co-creating value with your audience. The result is often richer and more resonant than anything created in isolation. Your brand benefits from lower content costs, faster feedback loops, and a community that feels invested in your success.

For e-commerce entrepreneurs and Amazon sellers, the takeaway is clear: don’t do everything alone. Tap into the crowd. Let your customers, fans, and creator partners share the load – and the spotlight. Crowdsourcing can drive innovation, amplify your marketing, and deepen customer loyalty all at once. It’s a powerful reminder that in the digital age, the best growth strategy is one that includes your crowd. So start thinking about areas of your business where an open call could spark the next big win. By embracing crowdsourcing, you invite your most passionate stakeholders to help shape your brand’s story – and that collective effort can translate into stronger sales and sustainable growth. Now’s the time to put the power of the crowd to work for you!