Kickstarter Drops Amazon Payments For Stripe
Context & Ripple Effects
Kickstarter's switch lands mid-consolidation in marketplace payments: weeks after Balanced shut down its payments platform and moved customers to rival Stripe, and months before Amex chose Stripe to power its own checkout. Stripe was absorbing independent processors while signing marquee clients.
For Amazon, this is an early loss of a flagship crowdfunding account — though the two companies' paths later crossed again when Amazon launched a partner program to push Pay with Amazon into e-commerce platforms rather than chasing individual merchants.
First-order effects
- Kickstarter's project funding and creator payouts now run on Stripe's infrastructure, making Stripe a core dependency of one of the highest-profile marketplaces on the web.
- Amazon Payments loses a visible merchant at exactly the moment standalone processors are folding into Stripe, narrowing Amazon's direct-payments footprint.
Second-order effects
- Competing processors face the same math that closed Balanced: matching Stripe's developer experience and pricing without its scale becomes untenable, accelerating consolidation.
- The win gives Stripe proof points for courting other marketplaces — later reflected in contractor-payout products like Instant Payouts rolled out from Lyft and Care.com.
Third-order effects
- Processor choice hardens into policy control: years later Kickstarter attributed its stricter mature-content rules to Stripe's requirements — rules it walked back after creator backlash forced a retraction — showing platforms inherit their processors' compliance constraints.
- If the pattern holds, payments infrastructure concentrates around a few API providers until even former rivals become partners — Stripe eventually became a strategic payments partner for Amazon itself.
The trend: Marketplace payments are consolidating onto Stripe's API layer, shifting real leverage over platform policies and payouts from the platforms themselves to the processors underneath them.