13 ms·

Kickstarter switches to Stripe

452 points by pc 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
650REDHAIR 12y ago
The biggest shock is that Stripe is used by Facebook and Twitter. I had no idea!
- omarchowdhury 12y ago
  What? Facebook uses Stripe for their entire payments system? Even the ads?
skdoo 12y ago
Awesome. This fixes one of my least favorite things about Kickstarter both as a project creator and backer.
com2kid 12y ago
I am very surprised Amazon is killing payments. All in all though, this means I will be much less likely to support any Kickstarters. With Amazon Payments, I did not have to re-enter my CC#. Backing a project became an impulse buy. Click, type PW, done. Now I have to go get my wallet, type in a bunch of information, which gives me a LOT longer to think about if I really want to back a project or not. Indeed the primary reason I use Kickstarter over other funding websites is because I don't have to re-enter that payment information so often.
- Aldo_MX 12y ago
  I thought that Stripe gave sellers a customer token, so you only had to write your card details once.
- Bahamut 12y ago
  You don't have to get your wallet if they have sophisticated Stripe support - now you can get your Stripe card info by entering in a code that is texted to you.
- geofft 12y ago
  There's a "Remember this card for future pledges" checkbox. So if you value having your CC saved, you can keep that feature.
  - dspillett 12y ago
    But this is then an extra place where his credit card details are stored, and he may not have decided to trust Stripe like that yet.
    - califield 12y ago
      Big payment processors like Stripe are storing your full credit card number forever whether you choose to "Remember me" or not. The checkbox is whether you want to be able to pay again without retyping it.
      - com2kid 12y ago
        I mentioned in another part of this thread, the payment page as shown on the blog entry does not indicate that my CC# is stored with Stripe, rather from all appearances it appears to be stored with Kickstarter. Now having read this thread I get that in fact Stripe is storing it, but if I hadn't read the responses to my initial post, I'd just assume Kickstarter was asking to store my CC# which I wouldn't agree to.
    - Aldo_MX 12y ago
      What Kickstarter save is a unique token, ex. da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 (not a real token, just an example). The token can only be used with the private / public key pairs that Stripe provided to them, so even if a hacker got access to Kickstarter's database, they would still need the private/public keys to make use of the tokens. Also, my expectations are that only whitelisted IPs should be able to access Stripe with the key pairs of Kickstarter.
      - singlow 12y ago
        Not only that. The hacker could only use the token to transfer money between you and KickStarter, not to another account. So unless they also had access to make withdrawals from KickStarter - they couldn't do anything useful other than annoy KickStarter with a bunch of erroneous charges.
- pc 12y ago
  Backing projects is going to get easier—your card details will be saved. Not only will you not have to re-enter your payment information when you back a project, but you won't even have to go to Amazon each time.
- MichaelTieso 12y ago
  Amazon is not killing payments, just a product for payments. Eventually everything but Login and Pay with Amazon will be discontinued.
  - EGreg 12y ago
    Like what?
  - nailer 12y ago
    I always thought 'Pay with Amazon' was 'Amazon payments'. What's the difference?
TheCraiggers 12y ago
I'm shocked that Amazon is killing off their payment service. I'm also shocked that the first I'm hearing about it is Kickstarter moving away from that platform. From my vantage point, I can't imagine why they would kill off that service. It seems like easy money, with very little risk involved for them. The only thing I can think of is some change to the PCI rules that make it a less appealing business to be in. Anybody know why they're exiting that market? Google searches haven't turned up anything useful.
- abritishguy 12y ago
  They didn't say that - they said they were killing of the specific package they were using.
  - makomk 12y ago
    Not sure what exactly they've dropped, but I know Amazon Payments haven't been accepting new crowdfunding sites for years. It's got to be a major fraud risk; the only reason they don't get more chargebacks is because most projects fail outside of the chargeback window offered by credit card companies.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      The concept of chargebacks, as often applied in practice, seems absurd to me. If you have a credit card then you're also supposed to be a reasonably responsible adult. You shouldn't just get to use a mechanism intended for defense against theft and fraud just because you regret a purchase. Why can't the payment company simply accuse you of fraud when you attempt fraudulent chargebacks?
      - derefr 12y ago
        Because the "security model" of credit cards involves shifting all seller-fraud risk onto the sellers using chargebacks. It's far easier—and good for business!—to trust customers' complaints 100% of the time, than it is to actually figure out whether a purchase is real or a spurious charge. Especially now that virtual goods exist: as far as the credit card company can see from its vantage point, those are effectively spurious charges that the customer happens to say are okay.
kepano 12y ago
Great news. As a 2x Kickstarter creator and having backed dozens of projects the Amazon payment process has always been the worst part of the experience.
smackfu 12y ago
I'm surprised Kickstarter needs a payments partner at all. They are a pretty big business. In fact, I think they already did charges directly for non-US backers.
- stepstep 12y ago
  Processing credit card transactions is a hard enough problem that it rarely makes sense for any non-payments company to do it themselves. Dropbox and Airbnb use Braintree (a Stripe competitor) for payments, and they are both much bigger than Kickstarter. Even Twitter and Facebook have been known to use Stripe for various products, and they are obviously much bigger than Kickstarter as well.
- jamtur01 12y ago
  Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
- jamtur01 12y ago
  Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
- jamtur01 12y ago
  Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
- jamtur01 12y ago
  Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
- jamtur01 12y ago
  Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
- jamtur01 12y ago
  Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
zefhous 12y ago
With Stripe's straight-forward pricing at 2.9% + $0.30, I don't understand the pricing ambiguity here: "and Stripe, our payments processor, will apply credit card processing fees (about 3-5%)." Why 3-5%? Is there something I'm missing?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  Kickstarter may feel that for the audience for this announcement it is better to use an approximate percentage alone rather than a percentage plus flat fee description, and if you assume that $15 is at the low end of Kickstarter contribution levels, its pretty close to the point where 2.9%+$0.30 is 5%, so "about 3-5%" may well be a reasonably accurate description of the fee structure.
  - pc 12y ago
    Yep, this is what they're getting at. (I work at Stripe.)
    - abritishguy 12y ago
      >work at stripe That's an understatement ;)
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    Plus no one will complain if the fee shows up as lower but there will be howls if it is larger.
- kelukelugames 12y ago
  Different credit cards charge different percentages.
smackfu 12y ago
It looks like Amazon discontinued WebPay (person-to-person payments) in October 2014. Maybe Kickstarter was using that (or an API version of it) to pay the funds from themselves to the project organizers? https://payments.amazon.com/help/76056 https://payments.amazon.com/help/76056
- makomk 12y ago
  Nah, I'm pretty sure Amazon paid the project directly as part of the transaction - the payments page always showed it as going to both the project and to Kickstarter. I think they used Amazon's product for multi-seller marketplaces: https://payments.amazon.com/help/201364500 https://payments.amazon.com/help/201364500
- saurik 12y ago
  I imagine they were using Amazon Flexible Payments, which is being sunset in a few months. I am glad to hear that other groups using Flexible Payments have decided to jump ship from Amazon rather than continue to migrate to Amazon's replacement.
kposehn 12y ago
> We’ve worked with Amazon Payments from the very beginning of Kickstarter — a year before we launched, in fact. They’ve been an excellent partner, processing $1 billion in pledges. Late last year Amazon decided to discontinue the payments product that we have used. Killing a payments product that racked up $1bn+ in payments boggles my mind. That is a level of profit to /keep/ a product, come what may.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Income isn't profit. Amazon probably only earn a small fraction of that.
- NhanH 12y ago
  $1b+ in payment was processed, which is far and much different than $1b+ in profit. We don't know what the margin is on that.
  - math0ne 12y ago
    If you cant find a way to make money on a billion dollars going though your service you are doing something wrong...
    - asb 12y ago
      Presumably the feature that is being discontinued is for authorising payments that aren't actually taken until later in the future. I could certainly imagine this has a disproportionately high support cost.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Killing a payments product that racked up $1bn+ in payments boggles my mind. That is a level of profit to /keep/ a product, come what may. Processing $1 billion in payments doesn't tell you anything about what the profits were. If the fees on those billion in payments weren't enough to cover the costs, it could still have been a loss, and even if it was profitable, it may have been only just barely so.
- 12y ago
fiblye 12y ago
I have no experience with Stripe, but Amazon Payments was a huge pain in the ass for me when trying to set up my Kickstarter. Kickstarter verified me just by asking for a bit of personal info. When I tried making an Amazon Payments account, it locked me out after one failed attempt of verification with absolutely no reason for why it failed. I was pretty sure I should've gotten 3 attempts, but nope. I then had to fax a bill proving I exist to Amazon in order to unlock it and try again. Got another attempt, and it locked me out once more. I then got a warning saying the next failed attempt would permanently disable my account. Called up Amazon and they unlocked it for me. The rep was about to hang up, but I made sure she stayed on the line to walk me through the issue step-by-step. Turns out Amazon's system didn't like the way I input my street address, even though it verified just fine on Kickstarter. Verification normally takes a few hours/days to tell you that you failed, but the rep stayed on the line and made sure it went through fine that time. Sorry for rambling on, but Amazon Payments gave me more trouble than any other payment service. Even Paypal was better. Googling for answers to my problems gave me countless results from other people who had the same mysterious problems, and it seemed many couldn't even get a response from customer service. If Stripe is even marginally better, then I'm glad they're moving on to them.
- habosa 12y ago
  I had the exact same experience. I have to have my friends buy things on Kickstarter for me since I don't feel like faxing Amazon proof of my existence (which they don't seem to require when I want to Amazon Prime some more USB cables).
  - bengali3 12y ago
    I think this concern is for receiving payments from kickstarter, not making payments to a project? no?
    - habosa 12y ago
      I have it for buying.
- 12y ago
mrschwabe 12y ago
Does this mean Canadians (and other non-Americans) can finally launch a Kickstarter denominated in USD ? From what I understand, unlike Amazon Payments which required a physical US address, to accept USD Stripe only requires a bank account denominated in US funds.
- skylan_q 12y ago
  To accept USD Stripe only requires a bank account denominated in US funds. I can confirm this is the case. We're a Canadian company and we have a USD account within our RBC business account. A week after getting a charge processed through Stripe, the funds end up in the USD account.
  - guan 12y ago
    Does your Canadian USD account have access to the US domestic payments system, so you could make deposits into it over ACH with a routing number and account number? Back in Denmark I had a USD account, but it could only send and receive USD by SWIFT wire transfer, so it wouldn’t function in the same way as an American USD account.
    - sleepyhead 12y ago
      For European companies it is required to have a US-based bank account for USD with Stripe. A USD account is not sufficient. The alternative is to be hit by a 2% conversion fee when charging in USD.
    - skylan_q 12y ago
      Does your Canadian USD account have access to the US domestic payments system, so you could make deposits into it over ACH with a routing number and account number? Don't quote me on it, but I think deposits can be made to it through ACH. The relationship in transferring funds between Canadian and American banks is only quasi-international.
michaelmcmillan 12y ago
Stripe are so successful! Truly a great example of developing a product which is at least one order of magnitude better than the competitors.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
HackinOut 12y ago
Sounds like good news. I can understand why they would choose amazon payments since amazon has more credit cards on file than anybody else including Paypal. But Amazon payments or Paypal (I am not referring to their gateway offering) is often something you use to complement a more classical credit card processor (i.e. users are able to input their CC infos directly on your site) like Stripe or Authorize.net. I really do not understand, until now, their choice of going exclusively with Amazon Payments for all this time. Preferred rates maybe?
swalsh 12y ago
I tried backing a kick starter once (the oculus one actually) but Amazon gave me a bunch of problems. I ended up giving up. I'm glad they're changing, I might actually try backing something again in the future.
netcan 12y ago
Kickstarter-like services with both a payer and a recipient are exactly the kind of case where I hope cryptocurrencies can contribute and unlock all sorts of unfulfilled potential. People who have only been on the customer side and are in the (small) majority that haven't encountered major problems think credit card systems are working fine. The truth is that there are major problems. First, the fees are substantial and even prohibitive for some types of services. Second, fraud including "friendly" fraud is prohibitively expensive in some industries such as those selling highly re-sellable items and/or accepting payments from certain countries. There are various vague arbitrary rules that fall under anti-fraud or anti-money laundering imposed by payment processors, bank or jurisdiction (which is ambiguous) that can suddenly deal a mortal blow to the service. Things are often dealt with callously penalizing people for being statistically suspicious. The downside is the loss of all the fraud protection and guarantees offered by CCs. But, the onus moves to the wallet owner who is really the only person who can do something about it. I wonder, can you start or contribute to a kickstarter in Nigeria or is that whole country effectively banned?
tomasien 12y ago
It's amazing that a company switching their payment processor is this big of news. It really says something about the state of payments right now, it's exciting!
- andyjsong 12y ago
  Not really, it's more of a win for Stripe, a YC company, so it's news for them.
napperjabber 12y ago
This has probably been stated several times by now, but the amazon documentation is absolutely horrible. Braintree, Stripe, and Paypal all have fantastic tech and reliable services in addition to fantastic documentation. I don't have an opinion for any other payment-processing vendors. Now for the war story: Business was focused on deploying amazon-payments because of the cheap fees. In order to change their minds, I had them call into tech support. After 3 hours and 5 hangups, business opted for another vendor. The implementation was effortless and only took me a few hours.
- mschuster91 12y ago
  > Braintree, Stripe, and Paypal all have fantastic tech and reliable services in addition to fantastic documentation. Paypal sucks for merchants. You're basically at their whim without any legal recourse. Just see what happened to Wikileaks or hundreds of merchants having their accounts frozen and their funds locked without any real reason!
  - kalleboo 12y ago
    PayPal isn't really that bad. Most of the horror stories are from people breaking the terms of service (donations without getting approval, long preorders etc). Wikileaks was blocked by MasterCard. We've been in PayPals sights a few times (we had a site bug once that double-charged a bunch of customers, and charged one customer 28 times! We had to do over 1000 chargebacks.) We got a massive rolling hold but the whole time PayPal were willing to talk to us. We've even won some customer card chargeback disputes on digital goods through PayPal. For a short while we switched to a traditional merchant account but that was hell from day one. Aside from the paperwork to get set up, they hated the fact that 40% of our sales were outside the U.S., that our sales are highly seasonal, etc. That said, to someone starting today, I'd still probably recommend Stripe instead.
timdorr 12y ago
Does this mean Stripe is extending the auth and capture timeout from 7 days? Or is this a special exemption for Kickstarter? https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-authorize-and-capture https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-aut...
- Scorponok 12y ago
  Presumably the "real" auth will be at the end of the project, which means it could still fail. This is also the case with kickstarter projects right now - typically a few % of your pledges fail and you can't collect the money from them.
- sevenproxies 12y ago
  From what I'm aware, authorization times are subject to the issuing banks. Some are valid for up to 30 days.
  - kweks 12y ago
    Further, MC and VISA regulations explicitly forbid charging a customer when a product is not sent within 30 days.
- aioprisan 12y ago
  I'd also like to know about this. The only way Stripe can provide the functionality needed by Kickstarter is to change the capture period to 90 days (campaign length), which was something that Amazon did as a one-off change for Kickstarter.
- nhangen 12y ago
  I'm fairly confident that they will simply tokenize credit cards/customers and use that info to process the charge once the project has succeeded. This could result in the funds not being available when the payment is submitted, but is still a much cleaner implementation and does not require that you hold funds and leave the period at the mercy of the bank.
- zmitri 12y ago
jacobn 12y ago
There's been a number of questions in this thread about Amazon killing off a payment product. Here's an excerpt from the email I got from them back in October: "We want to let you know that we are retiring the payment processing features of FPS as we transition to our new solution, Login and Pay with Amazon. FPS will not be available for processing payments after June 01, 2015." FPS = Flexible Payments Service. I've been using it on one of my sites. Yes, it's extremely annoying that they're killing it off.
- leeoniya 12y ago
  this really sucks. they're pushing everyone towards the widgets-only page-integrated checkout process "Login and Pay with Amazon". the problem here is that it kills the uniformity on our site. paypal has a leave-to-login & come-back-with-token process if you need auth-only charging or physical goods. we prefer this because our UI is the same for all payment methods, including paypal, our own processor and amazon.
  - ComputerGuru 12y ago
    Look at Amazon Simple Pay. That's what we've been using in lieu of FPS for the past few years, the process is identical to PayPal with regards to the checkout experience and integration, and it doesn't seem to be discontinued (yet).
    - leeoniya 12y ago
      their Simple Pay guides point to FPS functions for "advanced" usage. do you auth first and capture on shipment without relying on FPS functions (or widget checkout)? https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_Getting_Started_Guide.pdf https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_G... https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_Advanced_Users_Guide.pdf https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_A...
stesch 12y ago
Do I understand this correctly that you need a credit card to support a Kickstarter project? Different countries have a different credit card culture. In the USA you absolutely need one. In Germany you can find a lot of people who don't have one just because you don't need it in your day to day life.
- tarikjn 12y ago
  Do you mean they pay everything cash or they use debit/atm cards? In Europe these cards usually still work with the VISA or Mastercard networks.
  - jakozaur 12y ago
    For internet transactions a lot of ppl use payment from they internet banks. Debit cards are mainstream.
Glyptodon 12y ago
So happy about this. Hated having to pay through Amazon.
utopkara 12y ago
I was going to support the new 3doodler project after their launch email calling in for support, and then I saw that I needed my credit card at the payment step. I figured, they could reach their goal without me anyway...
- driverdan 12y ago
  How did you expect to pay?
  - mschuster91 12y ago
    If he's European, uh, we use things like inter-bank (SEPA) payments (prepaid) - usually arrives within one banking day, when both use the same bank or bank group, even instant. Or SEPA invoices where I as the customer only have to input my IBAN account number and be done. Or (not applicable here) pay when the postman arrives with the package.
  - utopkara 12y ago
    Amazon.
antidaily 12y ago
Wonder if WePay was allowed to bid on it.
davidw 12y ago
Just to state something a bit different from the herd: I use Amazon Payments (not FPS) for LiberWriter, and I'm happy with it. It makes particular sense since our customers have to have an Amazon account in any case.
mandeepj 12y ago
All - Could you please share what credit card processor you are using? I tried 2Checkout but they are asking me to remove certain features from my website which I can't do. I can't let a bank be the product manager of my website.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  We use Stripe and couldn't be happier. They're excellent in all respects.
zmitri 12y ago
Took 'em long enough. Only downside is that Amazon has smaller fees for micropayments than other payment providers at 2% + $0.05 for debit cards and 5% + $0.05 for credit. For comparison, Stripe has a rate of 2.9% + 30¢ -- but I'm sure KS will get a better deal due to the magnitude of their throughput. Given that the average pledge size is $25 it won't that much of a problem, but any of those $1 pledges are close to halved from KS+Stripe fees before they get to the creator.
- mecredis 12y ago
  Our average pledge is actually closer to $75 and the median pledge varies between $25 and $30. Source: https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats
  - zmitri 12y ago
    I saw it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/help/handbook/rewards https://www.kickstarter.com/help/handbook/rewards I read too quickly though, $25 is most popular reward level, $75 is average. Either way, it shouldn't be a big deal since it's much higher :)
anua15 12y ago
Ugh, stripe is a royal pain to use, horrible direction for kickstarter
- parkie 12y ago
  what ways do you find stripe to be a pain to use?
- stepstep 12y ago
  I've had a totally opposite experience. Stripe has been amazing for us. Clean API, good documentation, a slick dashboard, responsive support team, etc.
arikrak 12y ago
This is one of the top things people always asked Kickstarter. In general Braintree now seems like a better choice since it lets people pay with Payapl. Though I don't know if it could meet Kickstarter's needs to hold onto the money until a certain point.
joshdotsmith 12y ago
As someone who has built products that used both Amazon Payments and Stripe, I have to say this is definitely the right move, even if the impetus was that the former service is meeting its end. I built essentially a Kickstarter copycat in all but positioning and the amount of work involved there was dramatically more difficult than setting up a non-trivial implementation of Stripe marketplaces. But the developer pain is not nearly as strong as the customer pain. Amazon sucked for creators, and Stripe is pretty painless. The right move, and further cements Stripe as the rightful market leader.
skbohra123 12y ago
Does this mean that you no longer have to to be in US/UK/Canada for starting a campaign on Kickstarter?
chamby 12y ago
Stripe is a great company to work with. I am part of the team that runs https://cottonbureau.com https://cottonbureau.com, a crowd funded apparel site. We launched with Amazon in 2013 and quickly transitioned to Stripe after only two weeks with Amazon. It has been smooth sailing ever since. The APIs, customer support, and overall ease of use make this the right move for Kickstarter too.

452 points by pc 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

650REDHAIR 12y ago

The biggest shock is that Stripe is used by Facebook and Twitter. I had no idea!

omarchowdhury 12y ago
What? Facebook uses Stripe for their entire payments system? Even the ads?

skdoo 12y ago

Awesome. This fixes one of my least favorite things about Kickstarter both as a project creator and backer.

com2kid 12y ago

I am very surprised Amazon is killing payments. All in all though, this means I will be much less likely to support any Kickstarters. With Amazon Payments, I did not have to re-enter my CC#. Backing a project became an impulse buy. Click, type PW, done. Now I have to go get my wallet, type in a bunch of information, which gives me a LOT longer to think about if I really want to back a project or not. Indeed the primary reason I use Kickstarter over other funding websites is because I don't have to re-enter that payment information so often.

Aldo_MX 12y ago
I thought that Stripe gave sellers a customer token, so you only had to write your card details once.
Bahamut 12y ago
You don't have to get your wallet if they have sophisticated Stripe support - now you can get your Stripe card info by entering in a code that is texted to you.
geofft 12y ago
There's a "Remember this card for future pledges" checkbox. So if you value having your CC saved, you can keep that feature.
- dspillett 12y ago
  But this is then an extra place where his credit card details are stored, and he may not have decided to trust Stripe like that yet.
  - califield 12y ago
    Big payment processors like Stripe are storing your full credit card number forever whether you choose to "Remember me" or not. The checkbox is whether you want to be able to pay again without retyping it.
    - com2kid 12y ago
      I mentioned in another part of this thread, the payment page as shown on the blog entry does not indicate that my CC# is stored with Stripe, rather from all appearances it appears to be stored with Kickstarter. Now having read this thread I get that in fact Stripe is storing it, but if I hadn't read the responses to my initial post, I'd just assume Kickstarter was asking to store my CC# which I wouldn't agree to.
  - Aldo_MX 12y ago
    What Kickstarter save is a unique token, ex. da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 (not a real token, just an example). The token can only be used with the private / public key pairs that Stripe provided to them, so even if a hacker got access to Kickstarter's database, they would still need the private/public keys to make use of the tokens. Also, my expectations are that only whitelisted IPs should be able to access Stripe with the key pairs of Kickstarter.
    - singlow 12y ago
      Not only that. The hacker could only use the token to transfer money between you and KickStarter, not to another account. So unless they also had access to make withdrawals from KickStarter - they couldn't do anything useful other than annoy KickStarter with a bunch of erroneous charges.
pc 12y ago
Backing projects is going to get easier—your card details will be saved. Not only will you not have to re-enter your payment information when you back a project, but you won't even have to go to Amazon each time.
MichaelTieso 12y ago
Amazon is not killing payments, just a product for payments. Eventually everything but Login and Pay with Amazon will be discontinued.
- EGreg 12y ago
  Like what?
- nailer 12y ago
  I always thought 'Pay with Amazon' was 'Amazon payments'. What's the difference?

TheCraiggers 12y ago

I'm shocked that Amazon is killing off their payment service. I'm also shocked that the first I'm hearing about it is Kickstarter moving away from that platform. From my vantage point, I can't imagine why they would kill off that service. It seems like easy money, with very little risk involved for them. The only thing I can think of is some change to the PCI rules that make it a less appealing business to be in. Anybody know why they're exiting that market? Google searches haven't turned up anything useful.

abritishguy 12y ago
They didn't say that - they said they were killing of the specific package they were using.
- makomk 12y ago
  Not sure what exactly they've dropped, but I know Amazon Payments haven't been accepting new crowdfunding sites for years. It's got to be a major fraud risk; the only reason they don't get more chargebacks is because most projects fail outside of the chargeback window offered by credit card companies.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    The concept of chargebacks, as often applied in practice, seems absurd to me. If you have a credit card then you're also supposed to be a reasonably responsible adult. You shouldn't just get to use a mechanism intended for defense against theft and fraud just because you regret a purchase. Why can't the payment company simply accuse you of fraud when you attempt fraudulent chargebacks?
    - derefr 12y ago
      Because the "security model" of credit cards involves shifting all seller-fraud risk onto the sellers using chargebacks. It's far easier—and good for business!—to trust customers' complaints 100% of the time, than it is to actually figure out whether a purchase is real or a spurious charge. Especially now that virtual goods exist: as far as the credit card company can see from its vantage point, those are effectively spurious charges that the customer happens to say are okay.

kepano 12y ago

Great news. As a 2x Kickstarter creator and having backed dozens of projects the Amazon payment process has always been the worst part of the experience.

smackfu 12y ago

I'm surprised Kickstarter needs a payments partner at all. They are a pretty big business. In fact, I think they already did charges directly for non-US backers.

stepstep 12y ago
Processing credit card transactions is a hard enough problem that it rarely makes sense for any non-payments company to do it themselves. Dropbox and Airbnb use Braintree (a Stripe competitor) for payments, and they are both much bigger than Kickstarter. Even Twitter and Facebook have been known to use Stripe for various products, and they are obviously much bigger than Kickstarter as well.
jamtur01 12y ago
Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
jamtur01 12y ago
Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
jamtur01 12y ago
Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
jamtur01 12y ago
Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
jamtur01 12y ago
Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.
jamtur01 12y ago
Non-US projects already use Stripe. This moves means both US and non-US projects will use Stripe.

zefhous 12y ago

With Stripe's straight-forward pricing at 2.9% + $0.30, I don't understand the pricing ambiguity here: "and Stripe, our payments processor, will apply credit card processing fees (about 3-5%)." Why 3-5%? Is there something I'm missing?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 12y ago
Kickstarter may feel that for the audience for this announcement it is better to use an approximate percentage alone rather than a percentage plus flat fee description, and if you assume that $15 is at the low end of Kickstarter contribution levels, its pretty close to the point where 2.9%+$0.30 is 5%, so "about 3-5%" may well be a reasonably accurate description of the fee structure.
- pc 12y ago
  Yep, this is what they're getting at. (I work at Stripe.)
  - abritishguy 12y ago
    >work at stripe That's an understatement ;)
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  Plus no one will complain if the fee shows up as lower but there will be howls if it is larger.
kelukelugames 12y ago
Different credit cards charge different percentages.

smackfu 12y ago

It looks like Amazon discontinued WebPay (person-to-person payments) in October 2014. Maybe Kickstarter was using that (or an API version of it) to pay the funds from themselves to the project organizers? https://payments.amazon.com/help/76056 https://payments.amazon.com/help/76056

makomk 12y ago
Nah, I'm pretty sure Amazon paid the project directly as part of the transaction - the payments page always showed it as going to both the project and to Kickstarter. I think they used Amazon's product for multi-seller marketplaces: https://payments.amazon.com/help/201364500 https://payments.amazon.com/help/201364500
saurik 12y ago
I imagine they were using Amazon Flexible Payments, which is being sunset in a few months. I am glad to hear that other groups using Flexible Payments have decided to jump ship from Amazon rather than continue to migrate to Amazon's replacement.

kposehn 12y ago

> We’ve worked with Amazon Payments from the very beginning of Kickstarter — a year before we launched, in fact. They’ve been an excellent partner, processing $1 billion in pledges. Late last year Amazon decided to discontinue the payments product that we have used. Killing a payments product that racked up $1bn+ in payments boggles my mind. That is a level of profit to /keep/ a product, come what may.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Income isn't profit. Amazon probably only earn a small fraction of that.
NhanH 12y ago
$1b+ in payment was processed, which is far and much different than $1b+ in profit. We don't know what the margin is on that.
- math0ne 12y ago
  If you cant find a way to make money on a billion dollars going though your service you are doing something wrong...
  - asb 12y ago
    Presumably the feature that is being discontinued is for authorising payments that aren't actually taken until later in the future. I could certainly imagine this has a disproportionately high support cost.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Killing a payments product that racked up $1bn+ in payments boggles my mind. That is a level of profit to /keep/ a product, come what may. Processing $1 billion in payments doesn't tell you anything about what the profits were. If the fees on those billion in payments weren't enough to cover the costs, it could still have been a loss, and even if it was profitable, it may have been only just barely so.
12y ago

fiblye 12y ago

I have no experience with Stripe, but Amazon Payments was a huge pain in the ass for me when trying to set up my Kickstarter. Kickstarter verified me just by asking for a bit of personal info. When I tried making an Amazon Payments account, it locked me out after one failed attempt of verification with absolutely no reason for why it failed. I was pretty sure I should've gotten 3 attempts, but nope. I then had to fax a bill proving I exist to Amazon in order to unlock it and try again. Got another attempt, and it locked me out once more. I then got a warning saying the next failed attempt would permanently disable my account. Called up Amazon and they unlocked it for me. The rep was about to hang up, but I made sure she stayed on the line to walk me through the issue step-by-step. Turns out Amazon's system didn't like the way I input my street address, even though it verified just fine on Kickstarter. Verification normally takes a few hours/days to tell you that you failed, but the rep stayed on the line and made sure it went through fine that time. Sorry for rambling on, but Amazon Payments gave me more trouble than any other payment service. Even Paypal was better. Googling for answers to my problems gave me countless results from other people who had the same mysterious problems, and it seemed many couldn't even get a response from customer service. If Stripe is even marginally better, then I'm glad they're moving on to them.

habosa 12y ago
I had the exact same experience. I have to have my friends buy things on Kickstarter for me since I don't feel like faxing Amazon proof of my existence (which they don't seem to require when I want to Amazon Prime some more USB cables).
- bengali3 12y ago
  I think this concern is for receiving payments from kickstarter, not making payments to a project? no?
  - habosa 12y ago
    I have it for buying.
12y ago

mrschwabe 12y ago

Does this mean Canadians (and other non-Americans) can finally launch a Kickstarter denominated in USD ? From what I understand, unlike Amazon Payments which required a physical US address, to accept USD Stripe only requires a bank account denominated in US funds.

skylan_q 12y ago
To accept USD Stripe only requires a bank account denominated in US funds. I can confirm this is the case. We're a Canadian company and we have a USD account within our RBC business account. A week after getting a charge processed through Stripe, the funds end up in the USD account.
- guan 12y ago
  Does your Canadian USD account have access to the US domestic payments system, so you could make deposits into it over ACH with a routing number and account number? Back in Denmark I had a USD account, but it could only send and receive USD by SWIFT wire transfer, so it wouldn’t function in the same way as an American USD account.
  - sleepyhead 12y ago
    For European companies it is required to have a US-based bank account for USD with Stripe. A USD account is not sufficient. The alternative is to be hit by a 2% conversion fee when charging in USD.
  - skylan_q 12y ago
    Does your Canadian USD account have access to the US domestic payments system, so you could make deposits into it over ACH with a routing number and account number? Don't quote me on it, but I think deposits can be made to it through ACH. The relationship in transferring funds between Canadian and American banks is only quasi-international.

michaelmcmillan 12y ago

Stripe are so successful! Truly a great example of developing a product which is at least one order of magnitude better than the competitors.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

HackinOut 12y ago

Sounds like good news. I can understand why they would choose amazon payments since amazon has more credit cards on file than anybody else including Paypal. But Amazon payments or Paypal (I am not referring to their gateway offering) is often something you use to complement a more classical credit card processor (i.e. users are able to input their CC infos directly on your site) like Stripe or Authorize.net. I really do not understand, until now, their choice of going exclusively with Amazon Payments for all this time. Preferred rates maybe?

swalsh 12y ago

I tried backing a kick starter once (the oculus one actually) but Amazon gave me a bunch of problems. I ended up giving up. I'm glad they're changing, I might actually try backing something again in the future.

netcan 12y ago

Kickstarter-like services with both a payer and a recipient are exactly the kind of case where I hope cryptocurrencies can contribute and unlock all sorts of unfulfilled potential. People who have only been on the customer side and are in the (small) majority that haven't encountered major problems think credit card systems are working fine. The truth is that there are major problems. First, the fees are substantial and even prohibitive for some types of services. Second, fraud including "friendly" fraud is prohibitively expensive in some industries such as those selling highly re-sellable items and/or accepting payments from certain countries. There are various vague arbitrary rules that fall under anti-fraud or anti-money laundering imposed by payment processors, bank or jurisdiction (which is ambiguous) that can suddenly deal a mortal blow to the service. Things are often dealt with callously penalizing people for being statistically suspicious. The downside is the loss of all the fraud protection and guarantees offered by CCs. But, the onus moves to the wallet owner who is really the only person who can do something about it. I wonder, can you start or contribute to a kickstarter in Nigeria or is that whole country effectively banned?

tomasien 12y ago

It's amazing that a company switching their payment processor is this big of news. It really says something about the state of payments right now, it's exciting!

andyjsong 12y ago
Not really, it's more of a win for Stripe, a YC company, so it's news for them.

napperjabber 12y ago

This has probably been stated several times by now, but the amazon documentation is absolutely horrible. Braintree, Stripe, and Paypal all have fantastic tech and reliable services in addition to fantastic documentation. I don't have an opinion for any other payment-processing vendors. Now for the war story: Business was focused on deploying amazon-payments because of the cheap fees. In order to change their minds, I had them call into tech support. After 3 hours and 5 hangups, business opted for another vendor. The implementation was effortless and only took me a few hours.

mschuster91 12y ago
> Braintree, Stripe, and Paypal all have fantastic tech and reliable services in addition to fantastic documentation. Paypal sucks for merchants. You're basically at their whim without any legal recourse. Just see what happened to Wikileaks or hundreds of merchants having their accounts frozen and their funds locked without any real reason!
- kalleboo 12y ago
  PayPal isn't really that bad. Most of the horror stories are from people breaking the terms of service (donations without getting approval, long preorders etc). Wikileaks was blocked by MasterCard. We've been in PayPals sights a few times (we had a site bug once that double-charged a bunch of customers, and charged one customer 28 times! We had to do over 1000 chargebacks.) We got a massive rolling hold but the whole time PayPal were willing to talk to us. We've even won some customer card chargeback disputes on digital goods through PayPal. For a short while we switched to a traditional merchant account but that was hell from day one. Aside from the paperwork to get set up, they hated the fact that 40% of our sales were outside the U.S., that our sales are highly seasonal, etc. That said, to someone starting today, I'd still probably recommend Stripe instead.

timdorr 12y ago

Does this mean Stripe is extending the auth and capture timeout from 7 days? Or is this a special exemption for Kickstarter? https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-authorize-and-capture https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-aut...

Scorponok 12y ago
Presumably the "real" auth will be at the end of the project, which means it could still fail. This is also the case with kickstarter projects right now - typically a few % of your pledges fail and you can't collect the money from them.
sevenproxies 12y ago
From what I'm aware, authorization times are subject to the issuing banks. Some are valid for up to 30 days.
- kweks 12y ago
  Further, MC and VISA regulations explicitly forbid charging a customer when a product is not sent within 30 days.
aioprisan 12y ago
I'd also like to know about this. The only way Stripe can provide the functionality needed by Kickstarter is to change the capture period to 90 days (campaign length), which was something that Amazon did as a one-off change for Kickstarter.
nhangen 12y ago
I'm fairly confident that they will simply tokenize credit cards/customers and use that info to process the charge once the project has succeeded. This could result in the funds not being available when the payment is submitted, but is still a much cleaner implementation and does not require that you hold funds and leave the period at the mercy of the bank.
zmitri 12y ago

jacobn 12y ago

There's been a number of questions in this thread about Amazon killing off a payment product. Here's an excerpt from the email I got from them back in October: "We want to let you know that we are retiring the payment processing features of FPS as we transition to our new solution, Login and Pay with Amazon. FPS will not be available for processing payments after June 01, 2015." FPS = Flexible Payments Service. I've been using it on one of my sites. Yes, it's extremely annoying that they're killing it off.

leeoniya 12y ago
this really sucks. they're pushing everyone towards the widgets-only page-integrated checkout process "Login and Pay with Amazon". the problem here is that it kills the uniformity on our site. paypal has a leave-to-login & come-back-with-token process if you need auth-only charging or physical goods. we prefer this because our UI is the same for all payment methods, including paypal, our own processor and amazon.
- ComputerGuru 12y ago
  Look at Amazon Simple Pay. That's what we've been using in lieu of FPS for the past few years, the process is identical to PayPal with regards to the checkout experience and integration, and it doesn't seem to be discontinued (yet).
  - leeoniya 12y ago
    their Simple Pay guides point to FPS functions for "advanced" usage. do you auth first and capture on shipment without relying on FPS functions (or widget checkout)? https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_Getting_Started_Guide.pdf https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_G... https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_Advanced_Users_Guide.pdf https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_A...

stesch 12y ago

Do I understand this correctly that you need a credit card to support a Kickstarter project? Different countries have a different credit card culture. In the USA you absolutely need one. In Germany you can find a lot of people who don't have one just because you don't need it in your day to day life.

tarikjn 12y ago
Do you mean they pay everything cash or they use debit/atm cards? In Europe these cards usually still work with the VISA or Mastercard networks.
- jakozaur 12y ago
  For internet transactions a lot of ppl use payment from they internet banks. Debit cards are mainstream.

Glyptodon 12y ago

So happy about this. Hated having to pay through Amazon.

utopkara 12y ago

I was going to support the new 3doodler project after their launch email calling in for support, and then I saw that I needed my credit card at the payment step. I figured, they could reach their goal without me anyway...

driverdan 12y ago
How did you expect to pay?
- mschuster91 12y ago
  If he's European, uh, we use things like inter-bank (SEPA) payments (prepaid) - usually arrives within one banking day, when both use the same bank or bank group, even instant. Or SEPA invoices where I as the customer only have to input my IBAN account number and be done. Or (not applicable here) pay when the postman arrives with the package.
- utopkara 12y ago
  Amazon.

antidaily 12y ago

Wonder if WePay was allowed to bid on it.

davidw 12y ago

Just to state something a bit different from the herd: I use Amazon Payments (not FPS) for LiberWriter, and I'm happy with it. It makes particular sense since our customers have to have an Amazon account in any case.

mandeepj 12y ago

All - Could you please share what credit card processor you are using? I tried 2Checkout but they are asking me to remove certain features from my website which I can't do. I can't let a bank be the product manager of my website.

StavrosK 12y ago
We use Stripe and couldn't be happier. They're excellent in all respects.

zmitri 12y ago

Took 'em long enough. Only downside is that Amazon has smaller fees for micropayments than other payment providers at 2% + $0.05 for debit cards and 5% + $0.05 for credit. For comparison, Stripe has a rate of 2.9% + 30¢ -- but I'm sure KS will get a better deal due to the magnitude of their throughput. Given that the average pledge size is $25 it won't that much of a problem, but any of those $1 pledges are close to halved from KS+Stripe fees before they get to the creator.

mecredis 12y ago
Our average pledge is actually closer to $75 and the median pledge varies between $25 and $30. Source: https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats
- zmitri 12y ago
  I saw it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/help/handbook/rewards https://www.kickstarter.com/help/handbook/rewards I read too quickly though, $25 is most popular reward level, $75 is average. Either way, it shouldn't be a big deal since it's much higher :)

anua15 12y ago

Ugh, stripe is a royal pain to use, horrible direction for kickstarter

parkie 12y ago
what ways do you find stripe to be a pain to use?
stepstep 12y ago
I've had a totally opposite experience. Stripe has been amazing for us. Clean API, good documentation, a slick dashboard, responsive support team, etc.

arikrak 12y ago

This is one of the top things people always asked Kickstarter. In general Braintree now seems like a better choice since it lets people pay with Payapl. Though I don't know if it could meet Kickstarter's needs to hold onto the money until a certain point.

joshdotsmith 12y ago

As someone who has built products that used both Amazon Payments and Stripe, I have to say this is definitely the right move, even if the impetus was that the former service is meeting its end. I built essentially a Kickstarter copycat in all but positioning and the amount of work involved there was dramatically more difficult than setting up a non-trivial implementation of Stripe marketplaces. But the developer pain is not nearly as strong as the customer pain. Amazon sucked for creators, and Stripe is pretty painless. The right move, and further cements Stripe as the rightful market leader.

skbohra123 12y ago

Does this mean that you no longer have to to be in US/UK/Canada for starting a campaign on Kickstarter?

chamby 12y ago

Stripe is a great company to work with. I am part of the team that runs https://cottonbureau.com https://cottonbureau.com, a crowd funded apparel site. We launched with Amazon in 2013 and quickly transitioned to Stripe after only two weeks with Amazon. It has been smooth sailing ever since. The APIs, customer support, and overall ease of use make this the right move for Kickstarter too.