Kickstarter seems to have interestingly set itself up as a workable intermediary for that: you can set up a Kickstarter that is basically a glorified way of taking preorders, people can pay for them via Paypal, and generally Paypal doesn't cause trouble in those cases.
Isn't Kickstarter sort of like an escrow service in that case? Not sure how that would work, but do know that here in the Netherlands most companies accepting payments on behalf of others (i.e payment providers), have some sort of trust/foundation that owns the company or holds the money.
Huh, you're correct. I had this memory of having funded someone via Paypal, even could visualize the Paypal email confirmation, and I go and look, and it is indeed an Amazon Payments confirmation instead. Weird lapse of memory; sorry for the noise!
In fact, it is specifically due to Amazon Payments simple mechanism for getting a pre-authorized token that can later be captured that allows Kickstarter to run that business
(PayPal now supports this through PayPal X, but did not at the time that Kickstarter was being first released. Getting access to this API from PayPal requires more authorization than from Amazon, but the result is also more powerful: you can hold tokens with no expiration and seemingly no cap.)
Looking through the AdaptivePayments API, the limits on preapproval are one year and $2000, although you can ask to raise those limits on a case-by-case basis.
