Alex, thanks very much for sharing your experience. It’s always good to hear from someone who’s actually been through the process.

If someone is asking for $100,000 and they’re an unknown, then they’re going to be a substantially riskier project than someone who has a proven track record and is a known entity.

That’s why I think Kickstarter is better suited to those with some sort of fan/customer base already in place; so they are more likely avoid situations like this for the simple reason that they have a real stake in it.

In any case, Kickstarter’s ‘all or nothing’ approach helps weed out a lot of projects that are destined for failure anyway.

We only had to refund about 15 backers but you can’t do it through Kickstarter — you have to do it through the tedious clunker that is Amazon Payments.

Since people’s payment names are often not the same as their backer usernames (eg paid with wife’s credit card, business account, maiden name, or just like having a username like “fluffy”), you have to request their transaction ID. Which annoys people, because they just want a refund, not to dig up a 25-digit number for you.

I think a batch refund is easier, and may be possible through Kickstarter, but in our case we did not have to do that.

The entire Amazon Payments setup also makes refunds difficult another way too: it takes 7-10 days to put money IN to Amazon Payments, OR to withdraw. And if you try to put in more than $5k at once, 90% of the time Amazon Payments bounces it back/rejects the funding because its systems go WHOA THASSA LORRA LORRA MONEY… even if the previous week you’ve just taken $32k out of the same A.Payments account. It took us nearly a month to process refunds simply because Amazon Payments would not take back the money that had so recently come in to it. (Five attempts. FIVE attempts and endless hours on the phone with their shitty, shitty customer sevice. And finally I caved and only put in $2k and hoped I didn’t get a ton of refunds.) And if I’d done the refunds via Paypal, I would have paid double fees :/

On the one hand, that’s good… I don’t like Paypal’s ability to just reach into my bank account and hoover out money. On the other hand…. FIVE. ATTEMPTS. TO. GIVE. THEM. MONEY.

The systems are connected in that if you refund a backer in Amazon Payments, it does bleed back to Kickstarter and that backer stops getting your updates, etc.

(Our project is late on digital release, but we still look like we’re going to make our print date. Our refund offer still stands.)