Today we’re excited to announce a seemingly small change that will actually make it a lot easier to use Kickstarter: We’re partnering with Stripe to seamlessly collect and process payments for all projects on Kickstarter. We've already started moving projects over to the new system, and by next week, it will be in place for all new projects.

For project creators, this means you won’t need to set up an Amazon Payments business account anymore. Instead, you’ll just enter your bank account details on the Account tab when you’re drafting your project on Kickstarter. It takes about two minutes, whereas the old way could take a few days. It will look like this (with some small differences depending on your country of residence):

For backers, this means a simpler, faster and easier checkout process. No more being redirected or having to log in to a separate service. It takes half the steps, and it all happens on Kickstarter. Here’s how it will look:

Here are answers to a few questions you might have:

I’m about to launch a project. Should I wait?

We always recommend launching whenever you’re ready. If you’ve completed all of the steps of project build, have the green light to launch, and want to go live, then go forth! If you’re still working on getting your project set up, we should be fully transitioned to Stripe by next week.

Are your fees changing?

No. You can view a complete rundown of our fees here, but the short of it is that they’re staying the same. If your project is successfully funded, we will apply a 5% fee to the total amount of funds raised and Stripe, our payments processor, will apply credit card processing fees (about 3-5%).

Why the move to Stripe?

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 Amazon Flexible Payment Service, the payments product that we have used. We took the opportunity to consider the best possible partner to process payments for creators and backers moving forward. After careful consideration, we decided on Stripe. Stripe processes payments for Twitter and Facebook, and we’ve gotten to know their team and product well. We’re thrilled to partner with them.

Any more questions, you can reach us here. Thanks!