On 06 Jan 15, Kickstarter announced they would be moving from Amazon payments to a new service called Stripe. KS reported that this would speed up payments, both for Creators (who would no longer need to wait for Amazon to approve a business acocunt) and for Backers (who would no longer be directed to Amazon’s site to complete their pledges).
KS gave their reason for the change as Amazon making changes to their payment methods, and during the review they decided to no longer supply the package they currently had going with KS. From a business point of view, this completely stumped me; with 3.3 million backers in 2014 pledging $529 million and Amazon taking a cut of 3-5% of this, I just couldn’t believe Amazon would shut KS off. Maybe I’m missing something, maybe the set up fees and money transfers sap the profit to the point where it just isn’t viable; no idea on this one.
From a personal stand point, I’m not sure this even really matters to me. I’ve shopped with Amazon for years, and never really found it that big a pain to just log out using my details saved on their servers. The new Stripe system may be quicker, but it does mean another company may have my details, increasing my risk of fraud. Stripe is huge though (even taking payments for Twitter and Facebook, plus a gamut of other companies) so I guess their security will be pretty beefy. Fingers crossed eh!?
As a hopefully-soon-to-be Creator, Stripe should mean a shorter set up process as the details are added straight to the KS page and won’t need Amazon to approve them, a process I’m led to believe can take several days. But is that a big deal? Not sure about you, but a few more days isn’t going to make me throw up my arms in exasperation, losing sleep as I stare at my emails, willing Amazon to get in contact.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m not that excited by the changes. A couple of minutes saved here, a few days saved there, no great shakes.
What do you guys think? Excited by the speed ups? Have I missed some glaring truth that’ll get my motor running for Stripe? Would you have prefered Amazon stay in the payment driving seat? As always, I’d love to hear from you!
Hear us discuss this issue on our podcast: https://tinkerbotgames.com/tt-ep-10/
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