Kickstarter Drops Amazon Payments For Stripe

by Sarah Perez - Techcrunch

Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter announced 

today that it’s partnering with payments service

Stripe, which will now collect and process all

payments for projects hosted on Kickstarter’s site.

Since its founding, Kickstarter used Amazon

Payments for this, but claims it had to make

the switch because late last year, Amazon

decided to discontinue the payments product

that Kickstarter was previously using. That

decision led Kickstarter to analyze the

possibilities, and ultimately it chose the

well-liked and growing company Stripe, 

most recently valued at $3.5 billion 

following its recent $70 million funding round.

Stripe processes payments for some of the

biggest tech companies, including Facebook

and Twitter, as well as others like Lyft,

Shopify, TaskRabbit, Instacart, Rackspace,

Postmates, Handybook, Salesforce, OpenTable,

Bigcommerce, Reddit, Squarespace, WuFoo,

and many others. It has become popular for

 its ease of use and setup, simple and

transparent pricing, and because it offers

companies complete control over the

 checkout experience.

“Stripe will help Kickstarter’s users reach

a broader audience and see higher

conversion rates from backers anywhere

 in the world – especially those coming

from mobile devices,” the company says.

For project creators, Kickstarter says this change means

they’ll no longer have to set up an Amazon Payments

business account anymore, but instead will enter

their bank account details on the Account tab of

their Kickstarter project’s draft. The change will

also speed up the time it takes to go live on

Kickstarter – before, the Amazon Payments

setup process took a few days. With Stripe,

the process takes just a couple of minutes.

For backers of a project, checkout will be

easier as they’ll no longer be redirected or

have to log into a separate service. The

 checkout flow will also now take place

entirely on Kickstarter.com itself.

Kickstarter says its fees are not increasing

as a result of the move – it will apply a

5% fee to the total amount of funds

raised and Stripe will apply credit card

processing fees (about 3%-5%).

The move to Stripe will be completed

by next week.

Kickstarter has processed $1.2 billion

in pledges via Amazon Payments, which

 it was using even a year before launching

to the public. The payments service was

selected at the time for being of the only

ones that allowed Kickstarter backers to

pledge money, but only be charged

when projects reached their funding goals.

Recently, 

the company gave a look at its business over the past year, 

noting that 3.3 million backers in 2014 pledged $529

million, resulting in 22,000 funded projects.