[dangrossman]

First off, I have never run a project on KickStarter so I don't know any of the details first-hand. I'm only guessing -- Amazon has a product called Amazon Flexible Payments Service. One of the things this API allows is marketplaces where you facilitate payments between buyers and sellers and take a cut of the transaction. This is probably how KickStarter works and takes their 5% cut; it's KickStarter's code and API keys that kick off the payment, and while the money ends up in the individual Amazon Payments account of the project starter, the fee gets sliced off and deposited to KS's account. So while they are not a processor or the recipient of the funds, they're still tied to every transaction; plus, they no doubt have a special arrangement with Amazon due to the amount of money they're handling and the fact that Amazon doesn't accept other crowdfunding services as customers of its payment services.