Kickstarter, the platform used by artists and inventors to raise funds for new projects, is leaving Amazon for Stripe. Stripe is a new online payments service known for its flexibility and ease of setup. Venture capital investors recently valued the company at $3.5 billion.
With this reshuffle, Kickstarter’s project creators should be able to get up and running more quickly — they previously had to set up a business account with Amazon, which could take up to seven days for approval, before launching a Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter campaign backers can also now make their pledges in fewer steps, since they won’t have to leave Kickstarter to pay on Amazon (Kickstarter was using a legacy Amazon Payments product that didn’t allow this; Amazon’s new payments product does). Lastly, Kickstarter can use Stripe to process all the transactions on its platform, both in the U.S. and abroad. Amazon Payments’ lack of international support forced Kickstarter to use another payments processor for overseas campaigns.
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.
For Amazon, the loss of Kickstarter is a speed bump as Jeff Bezos pushes the payments team to move faster and expand its reach. Kickstarter had used Amazon since its 2009 launch to process credit cards for U.S. campaigns.
