There's nothing ambiguous about that case. Accepting pre-orders and "donations" is an enormous risk for a payment processor. The merchant isn't sending anything out in exchange for the payments. They could fail to complete or send the product. The risk continues to increase the more pre-orders come in. The merchant can't substantiate that they can fulfill the orders since they have no history of shipping that product in the past. If they were taking payments through a real merchant account (why aren't they? well, they'd have a real tough time getting underwriting to allow it), the bank's risk department probably would've frozen them or required establishment of a risk reserve account too.

Strange. Isn't that the business model of kickstarter ? There was this system for iphones allowing to film at 360°. The collected money is mainly preorders and they obtain nearly 8x the money they asked for.

Kickstarter uses Amazon payments, perhaps for this very reason.