Kickstarter Ditches Amazon Payments for Stripe

From left, Patrick and John Collison. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Kickstarter says it wants to make things a lot easier for artists and inventors to use its crowdfunding site—and it’s doing so by dropping Amazon Payments in favor of a payments service from Silicon Valley startup Stripe.

On Tuesday, with a blog post, Kickstarter announced that Stripe would handle all credit card transactions on the site, saying the move should make things simpler for both creators, who no longer have to create an Amazon Payments business account and wait for approval, and backers, who can pledge money to a project they’re interested in with fewer steps.

Kickstarter’s decision is unfortunate for Amazon which, according to reports, has over 200 million credit cards on file and has long tried to make something of this vast database of customer payment information. But the move also shows that Stripe is continuing to reinvent the online payments world with its system, which can make it easier for any online service or smartphone app to process payments at low cost. The ultimate aim is to create an common internet infrastructure that lets payments move across the networks as easily as content—and the plucky startup is well on way to realizing this lofty goal.

In addition to driving Kickstarter, Stripe handles purchases on Facebook and Twitter. It helps drive Apple Pay, the tech giants smartphone payment system. And it’s powering payment for smaller outfits too, such as online-ride-hailing startup Lyft and internet-grocery-delivery outfit Instacart. With the mobile payments estimated to hit a whopping $1 trillion in 2017, according to research firm IDC, Stripe looks to be one of the more likely candidates to lead the charge

Kickstarter says it will start converting projects over to Stripe immediately, and by next week, the online payment system would be in place for all new projects.