Kickstarter Ditches Amazon Payments for Stripe

As Amazon’s ambition to get other websites to use its payments platform has grown in recent years, Kickstarter stood out as one of the few widely recognizable businesses on its customer list. No longer.

The popular platform used by artists and inventors to raise funds for new projects is leaving Amazon for Stripe. Stripe is the trendy online payments service known for its flexibility and ease of setup that venture capital investors recently valued at $3.5 billion.

The move should help Kickstarter in a few ways. Its 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.

For Amazon, the loss of Kickstarter is a speed bump as Jeff Bezos pushes the payments team to move faster and expand its reach. Amazon’s payments product is currently the center of a pitch it is making to online retailers to start giving perks to Amazon Prime customers on their own sites. Kickstarter had used Amazon since its 2009 launch to process credit cards for U.S. campaigns. More than $1.2 billion has flowed through Kickstarter since then.

At the time of Kickstarter’s launch, Amazon Flexible Payments was one of the few payments systems that would work with the Kickstarter model: campaign backers pledge money up front, but are only charged if the campaign hits its fundraising goal. When Amazon announced in 2014 that it would discontinue this service in the hopes of moving customers to its new Login and Pay product, Kickstarter reexamined its options for a credit card processing service and decided on Stripe.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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