KickstarterForum.org

[mattmarcy]

I'm starting to find people contacting me and asking how they can donate to my project without an Amazon account. I assumed that everyone must have one (or could sign up), but that's not the case. To make it worse, these people tend to be older supporters who will back at higher levels, but the idea of signing up with a credit card through Amazon is intimidating to them (as is all online shopping).
I wish Kickstarter took credit cards directly (or at least Paypal). Has anyone come up with a good solution to this? For example, taking donations/credit cards another way and having friends make the donation to Kickstarter to move toward your goal? Any thoughts?

[drlouisechughes]

It seems to be dependant on the country you are in. In the UK they only take direct payments rather than using the Amazons payments system, even though the payments are processed by amazon anyway. I don't know a way around this. I am aware of some kickstarters having a webpage were people can also donate that way. I think some have managed to link it into the pledge levels on kickstarter but have no idea how they did this. In general, the online payments are deemed to be in addition to the kickstarter payments, so it would not help to get you to goal. It may be that you could set up an account with friends so that payments on your website can go to them and then be added to your kickstarter. I think if you choose to do that you need to be very careful with your accounting.

[sbriggman]

@mattmarcy - Tough question. Wrote about this a bit here (how to convince skeptical backers to support your kickstarter): http://www.crowdcrux.com/how-to-convinc ... -campaign/

The only way that I can think of getting around this aside from the solutions in the link above) is having them all donate to one person and then having that person donate the funds to your campaign. Kind of a sketchy solution and yea, you need to be careful not to violate Kickstarter TOS or mess up the accounting. I believe this may be against Kickstarter TOS, but I would look into it.

[mattmarcy]

Ugh...more issues with donors -- big donors coming out of the woodwork at the end of this -- who are wary of signing up for a KS account or donating through the website. This is turning out to be a fundamental flaw of the KS system. I still don't know what the solution is, but it's creating a large extra headache for me in the final critical days of my campaign.