I'm surprised PayPal still haven't taken a clear stance against crowdfunding like Amazon Payments have. That's part of the problem - it's really vague as to what situations PayPal will intervene in.
I think that Kickstarter has their shit together, and the risk of a chargeback from Kickstarter to [project leader] is relatively low, compared to the risk of a project funded directly through Amazon Payments.
I don't know how indiegogo works, but in the case of Kickstarter, I would assume that Kickstarter is collecting the payments, arbiter of refunds in the case a goal is not met, and does not have access to the money in the interim.
Then Kickstarter uses Amazon Payments to disburse the funds to project lead? I am uneducated and did not contribute to the fund, so I don't really know how it works. Can you enlighten?
Not 100% sure but I think kickstarter uses amazon's deferred payment api. Basically they get authorizations from the donors to be charged a certain amount on their credit card, but the amount isn't charged until the crowdfunding ends successfully. If the goal isn't reached nothing is charged on credit cards, if it is, the money is sent to kickstarter's amazon payments account, and from there kickstarter sends it to the project after taking its cut.
Ah. So, it sounds lower risk for Amazon, but I don't really know how indiegogo and paypal interoperate, so maybe it's the same exact pattern.
Sounds like a fantastic racket for Kickstarter!
EDIT: I've read more of the comments and it sounds like IndieGoGo has nothing to do with Paypal. They were separate funding efforts, from the same landing page. "You can pay by IndieGoGo or Paypal."
I presume the reason I couldn't figure this out from the Mailpile website is that they stopped mentioning the PayPal option when it was clear that Mailpile wasn't going to get paid by PayPal in any kind of short order. You can pay IndieGoGo or you can send Bitcoins.
That's how I'd run my business if I didn't have a product yet. You'd have to be crazy to use PayPal for that.
EDIT2: I guess IndieGoGo does offer the PayPal option. I don't understand enough about how this is put together to have an informed opinion. If PPUSD and credit cards are all handled by PayPal, then it would seem that PayPal does indeed have some risk. Maybe it's actually accepting credit cards that's crazy. _THOSE_ have some serious anti-fraud guarantees, and there's more to fraud than simple non-delivery.
