Kickstarter Drops Amazon Payments For Stripe

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.

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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.