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Kong — Free and simple way to create a professional online store
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@coreyo Hi Corey, thanks for your great question.
Our aim is to appeal to a wide range of SMBs, with the features and flexibility of the established players, but with the ease-of-use afforded by the simplicity of the newer players. We know that this is no mean feat, but we have a great team and are working really hard to provide this to our customers.
The VP is simply that Kong provides businesses a professional online store for free. It’s the only platform that has no limits on products, storage or bandwidth, where stores can use their own domain and doesn’t charge monthly fees or transaction fees. Once you start digging into the other offerings, there's either quite a few limitations or the costs start rising quite quickly.
I hope this answers your questions. Let us know if you have any more?
Hey Kings (and Queens) of Kong (sorry, could help it) -- this is a sweet looking platform! What is it built on? How well are sites built on it being crawled by our good friend google? I'm always hesitant about new ecom platforms because SEO.
@kkdub Hi Kelly, lol, thanks for your kind words. There's a lot of great tech in Kong, all of the open source variety, so we're hugely grateful to the open source community for their help in developing the software that we use. On the backend, it's PHP and a few different data stores. Our themes are written using the twig templating engine, with some custom extensions and we'll be opening up our theme store to 3rd party developers in the near future.
Sites on our platform are loved by Google. Our themes get a score of 100% in Google's mobile readiness test. You get control of the meta data on all your pages. We handle all the XML site maps for you, and you can easily verify your Kong Store with Google's webmaster tools. The product pages include markup for schema.org, Twitter and Facebook tags too, so you get nice rich snippets in search results and when sharing links to products on social networks.
Let us know if you have any more questions and we'll be happy to help 😄
@neilcrookes Taking zero commision? I couldn't believe it, but awesome! Do you only support £ or is it a setting which can be changed?
@ykguler Hi Yiğitcan, lol, yeah, people have been a bit sceptical about the fact we don't charge subscription or transaction fees, but that would go against our mission - to make selling online, through your own eCommerce website, accessible to everyone.
We firmly believe in helping businesses become successful, then we hope that they'll choose to use some of our more advanced feature power-ups, apps and themes when their eCommerce business grows to need them.
Kong's been architected with support for multiple languages and currencies in mind, but we just support GBP at the moment I'm afraid. We'll be rolling out more languages and currencies in the near future though.
Thanks for your comments, shout if there's anything else you'd like to know.
@ykguler Thanks Yiğitcan! I'm glad to hear you like what we're doing with Kong :)
We currently only support GBP. However, we've designed and built Kong to work globally and will be turning on multi-currency and multi-lingual functionality in the future. We'll definitely be shouting about it on social media and on our website when it's ready, so keep an eye out!
@neilcrookes If everything's free, might as well open-source it right? Have you thought of that?
Hi ProductHunters!
Thanks for checking us out.
We’ve created Kong to be a free antidote for the many pain points eCommerce store owners have. Whether it’s complex pricing structures, ever-updating apps that throw your store out of whack, having to rely on developers and designers or a downright difficult-to-use admin. We’ve stepped right back and reconsidered the entire process in order to make eCommerce accessible to everyone.
What’s the catch?
There really isn’t one. Out of the box you get everything you need to create, run and grow a professional, beautiful store.
There are no restrictions on Kong. Have as many products you like, use as much bandwidth and storage as you need and make use of our incredibly flexible, customisable default theme; all for free.
We will make this all possible by selling more advanced feature power-ups, apps and third party themes for when your eCommerce business grows to need them.
Please reach out if you have any questions, or comments and feel free to go and create your own free store now.
@neilcrookes hey Neil, Kong looks great.
Two questions:
1. Do you support digital product fulfillment?
2. Is Kong able to handle recurring payments?
@markwilson12 Hi Mark thanks, we have a great team that have poured their heart and soul into it :)
Both those features are on our roadmap, and should be available in the near future.
Hi @ambonium, thanks for your question! You’re right, everything that's required to have your own professional online store is free. However, we’ve chosen not to have Kong as open source because we want to be able to offer a super simple solution for first time users, and installing software and setting up hosting isn’t always easy for everyone.
We do have some paid themes that store owners can choose to use if they want. And we'll be launching some paid power ups, apps and more themes in the near future that will help owners run and grow their business. The revenue from these will allow us to improve Kong even further :)
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