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Comment by kloncks | Hacker News Reader

Creator of the page over here.

Woke up to a really nice surprise here, especially having made this page two months ago. Submitting it to HN wasn't my plan; someone else randomly found the page and did that. Yes, indeed, it's Kout.me...if you care more, here's a short description:

Kout is a dead-simple eCommerce platform that enables anyone, anywhere to be a merchant across any platform with ease, elegance and simplicity. We make it fast & easy to both sell items and collect money online and do this by generating a simple one-page checkout that corresponds to a unique URL. We're also doing really cool things with dynamic pricing, payments, as well as social & mobile commerce.

Ah. I love HN.

View on HN

I'd like to ask a few questions, if you don't mind:

1. why don't you mention kout.me on the page?

2. how does your product differ from every payment processor that already provides a link for a single product checkout?

hope your stunt goes ok :)

I'm not sure why I veiled it a bit. I suppose it doesn't matter now and I made this some time back...

We're not a payments processor. What we are is very simple selling (payments included; part of the simplicity) that enables you to sell across any number of different platforms, like Facebook, WordPress blogs, Twitter, Craigslist (with checkout implementation), emails, etc etc. The only reason we deal with payments is that it's a crappy experience for the end-user to handle payment gateways and merchant accounts on their own. We get you up and running in seconds/minutes, not hours/weeks. There's not a lot of ways to sell cross-platform with ease, elegance and simplicity.

Does that make sense?

What I mean is that Google Checkout, PayPal and Authorize.NET offer essentially the same service. Here in Brazil all the major gateways (PagSeguro, MoIP, Pagamento Digital, PayPal) also offer very simple HTML "buy now" buttons with a streamlined payment process. Being a gateway you don't need to signup anywhere else either. If your focus is on improving the UX and sign-up process, that's laudable, but there's a shit ton of competition!

1. Didn't really want to mention the product on the page.

2. We merge in the ecommerce platform with the payment processor. We really just process payments so we can control the whole experience, but if you have your own gateway you can just plug the api keys in. Most ecommerce platforms require you to go signup with a 3rd party payment gateway, and the quick hack for most people is to go with paypal.

Our focus is really on the ecommerce side. eJunkies lame. 1shoppingcart's lame. Yeah a few others have poped up this year (quixly & gumroad) they just really validate the need. If you don't need a fully fledged frontend store your options are pretty limited.

I think someone tweeted about your page (not you). I thought, "aha cool", so went ahead and submitted to HN. :-)

did you get your meeting?

Haven't yet been contacted by CrunchFund. I'll update all this later with a blog post summarizing what happened.

Crazy traffic and a nice collection of emails so far.

Tell us how much traffic and how many emails

about a 100 emails in the last hour or so.

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