
Kickstarter switches to Stripe - pc
https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/making-payments-easier-for-creators-and-backers/
======
fiblye
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.

~~~
free2rhyme214
Funny how big companies continually do this.

Only a few big companies avoid doing this which is why startups will thrive
until they too become big slow companies.

~~~
jakejake
You can kinda tell when a process is designed around fraud prevention, rather
than being designed around user experience. Big companies make big targets and
so they naturally become more risk averse.

~~~
rhizome
Yet they also have the resources and manpower with skills to smooth it all out
if they wanted to. That is, if it's even possible; the financial system's
burdens may be insurmountable to provide a good UX.

~~~
bengali3
>the financial system's burdens may be ripe for someone to provide a good UX.

ftfy :)

where there's pain, there will eventually be innovation.

------
TheCraiggers
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.

~~~
wigginus
They don't say that Amazon is killing the whole payment service. Amazon just
discontinued the payment product used by Kickstarter, so far I can tell.

~~~
TheCraiggers
"Late last year Amazon decided to discontinue the payments product that we
have used."

I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong, I'm just not sure what else that
could mean. When I see a button to pay with Amazon, the button says "Amazon
Payments" on it, which I, as a layman, would call the Amazon Payments product
if I had to call it anything.

Of course, Kickstarter may have just misspoke. Or, like you said, it's a
specific product that only applied to Kickstarter. Either way, it's quite
confusing from where I'm sitting.

~~~
audiodude
I think the specific "product" they are referring to is Amazon's willingness
to accept the authorization at a certain point and then only actually charge
the card later when Kickstarter signaled that the project was funded.

I remember hearing a long time ago that Amazon wasn't particularly happy with
this arrangement, and had specifically declined to offer it to Kickstarter
competitors.

------
jacobn
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
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
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
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_G...](https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_Getting_Started_Guide.pdf)

[https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_A...](https://amazonpayments.s3.amazonaws.com/FPS_ASP_Guides/ASP_Advanced_Users_Guide.pdf)

------
napperjabber
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
> 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
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
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-
aut...](https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-authorize-
and-capture)

~~~
zmitri
You don't use auth and capture -- you create a customer (with the card/token)
in stripe and then create a charge against the customer.

Having a customer allows you to charge the user without entering in their info
each time.

EDIT: I built beaconreader.com which is a crowdfunding site and we use stripe.
One thing to note about creating customers is that on the backend Stripe (and
other payment providers) tells the banks that it's a recurring charge, even if
only charged once, which I believe allows them not to deal with the auth and
capture step. I could be wrong, but there's something like that lets
processors get away with it.

~~~
onassar
Hi zmitri: Do you have any more details on how Stripe and banks signal
recurring charges. What you're describing sounds interesting, but with our app
we see decent churn from the use of debit visa/mastercards

~~~
zmitri
No details whatsoever but I can across this because customers at certain banks
asked why their one time charges were showing up as recurring in their bank
statements. I emailed in to stripe asking what was up and they let me know it
was standard practice to do that, and it would do so if I used a stripe
customer.

------
mrschwabe
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
_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
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.

~~~
skylan_q
_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.

------
smackfu
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
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.

------
zefhous
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?

~~~
hackerboos
Last time I looked 'crowdfunding' was on the prohibited businesses list for
Stripe.

Kickstarter might have cut a deal to pay a higher percentage in order to be
allowed to use Stripe.

~~~
kordless
That hysterical because my Kickstarter got denied because they said my project
was 'prohibited' because it was a financial service. It's actually an Open
Source project:
[https://www.github.com/stackmonkey](https://www.github.com/stackmonkey).

------
650REDHAIR
The biggest shock is that Stripe is used by Facebook and Twitter. I had no
idea!

~~~
omarchowdhury
What? Facebook uses Stripe for their entire payments system? Even the ads?

------
smackfu
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)

~~~
saurik
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.

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

------
tomasien
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
Not really, it's more of a win for Stripe, a YC company, so it's news for
them.

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

------
swalsh
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.

------
joshdotsmith
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.

------
HackinOut
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?

------
zmitri
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
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
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 :)

------
kepano
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.

------
chamby
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.

------
kposehn
> 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.

~~~
NhanH
$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
If you cant find a way to make money on a billion dollars going though your
service you are doing something wrong...

~~~
asb
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.

------
netcan
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?

------
stesch
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
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
For internet transactions a lot of ppl use payment from they internet banks.
Debit cards are mainstream.

------
arikrak
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.

------
mandeepj
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
We use Stripe and couldn't be happier. They're excellent in all respects.

------
davidw
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.

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

------
skbohra123
Does this mean that you no longer have to to be in US/UK/Canada for starting a
campaign on Kickstarter?

------
utopkara
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
How did you expect to pay?

~~~
mschuster91
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.

------
antidaily
Wonder if WePay was allowed to bid on it.

------
anua15
Ugh, stripe is a royal pain to use, horrible direction for kickstarter

~~~
stepstep
I've had a totally opposite experience. Stripe has been amazing for us. Clean
API, good documentation, a slick dashboard, responsive support team, etc.

------
com2kid
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.

~~~
geofft
There's a "Remember this card for future pledges" checkbox. So if you value
having your CC saved, you can keep that feature.

~~~
dspillett
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.

~~~
Aldo_MX
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
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.

~~~
Aldo_MX
Haha, I forgot to mention that.

Basically, the only important information Kickstarter gets from any card are
the last 4 digits, whether it's Visa, Master Card, AMEX, etc., and the
expiration date.

