Due to Astra’s investment in the LatePoint booking and appointment plugin, WordPress is now the preferred platform for small businesses.
The company Astra, which creates the most well-known WordPress themes globally, recently revealed that it is investing in LatePoint, one of the most cutting-edge online booking platforms, further solidifying WordPress’ position as the preferred platform for companies.
With this change, everyone will have access to LatePoint’s robust scheduling, booking, and payment management features, particularly Astra users.
LatePoint: What Is It?
The complete online booking and appointment scheduling lifecycle is managed by the plugin LatePoint.
It integrates with six different payment gateways:
- Braintree
- Paystack
- PayPal
- Razorpay
- Square
- Stripe
Additionally, LatePoint automates routine workflow tasks like scheduling Zoom meetings, synchronizing calendars with external services, and sending email and SMS reminders.
Twilio integration and Facebook and Google sign-ups are supported by LatePoint. Companies can even monitor performance through the admin dashboard, which displays all of the features.
With just one plugin, LatePoint allows a variety of businesses, from hair salons to online service providers, to easily schedule appointments, send reminders, and take payments.
These capabilities are also listed in the Astra announcement:
“Client database: Upholds an extensive client database that offers instant access to contact details, preferences, and client histories for individualized support.
Adaptable booking forms: Make sure that appointments are scheduled with all the information required by customizing booking forms to collect particular information from clients.
LatePoint Is A Component Of A Bigger Plan
It is becoming increasingly obvious that Astra is developing a platform within a platform that enables small businesses to automate various processes in order to compete on an equal footing with much larger organizations as one looks more closely at what the company has been quietly doing.
For instance, Astra is the creator of the SureTriggers WordPress plugin.
SureTriggers facilitates small businesses in creating event-driven automations between third-party SaaS and WordPress plugins.
For debugging or monitoring purposes, SureTriggers provides history logs that illustrate the actions taken by the automations between the third-party SaaS and the connected plugins.
Custom webhooks and APIs are supported, along with workplace collaboration for the creation of automated workflows.
In order to help create complex automations, SureTriggers even provides the ability to delay an action, conditional logic, and filters.’
SureTriggers explains what it does as follows:
“Transfer data between your favorite services and apps—like HubSpot, Gmail, Mailchimp, etc.—with ease. SureTriggers can help you connect no matter what you need.
Popular WordPress plugins like Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, Elementor, CartFlows, and many more are easily integrated with SureTriggers.
Make multi-step automations that, when a particular event takes place, automatically and smoothly carry out a series of distinct tasks that you can customize.
Astra Integrates WordPress With Business: Spectra, their user-friendly page builder that supports both the older WordPress editor and the more recent Gutenberg blocks, is one of Astra’s standout features. When combined with the robust scheduling and appointment capabilities of LatePoint, WordPress becomes an absurdly capable business platform that can boost a small business’s performance to a level far higher than what was possible even five years ago without requiring a significant investment. All of this is done at a price that is affordable for any small business.
When combined, Astra’s efforts enable WordPress to function like a specialized business content management system while still providing all the advantages of the open source WordPress community.
Astra has quietly emerged as a pioneer in expanding WordPress’s features in a way that makes it a more appealing option for small enterprises.
With over 2.5 million websites using their templates globally, they have access to a vast audience of potential LatePoint users and advocates.
However, this investment demonstrates how Astra is rapidly emerging as the preferred option for WordPress-based companies and developing strong substitutes for proprietary closed-source content management systems.
The Astra announcement is clear about their goal of making WordPress a compelling option for companies:
We can’t wait to collaborate closely with the LatePoint team, apply our ideas, and implement Brainstorm Force procedures.
We are eager to provide small businesses and the greater WordPress community with an enterprise-grade, dependable, robust, and modern appointment and booking solution.
I can’t emphasize enough how mission-driven our organization is. The goal of everything we do is to help small businesses fully utilize the internet.”
Strong Linkage With Astra Products
Astra promises tighter integration between all of its plugins, including SureCart, an alternative to WooCommerce, and SureTriggers, which is an intriguing factor to take into account.
One intriguing plugin in the Astra suite of business-related plugins is SureTriggers. WordPress users can create an automated workflow by integrating any other tool or plugin with SureTriggers.
It functions by automating WordPress plugins so they can cooperate, linking WordPress to hundreds of SaaS apps, and even connecting your various websites and services to automate a variety of tasks.
For A Limited Time, One-Time Payment Pricing Is Available
Astra declared that they will be launching a lifetime payment plan that offers a single-payment lifetime license along with all of LatePoint’s features.
Astra Investment at LatePoint
Before finding out about Astra’s investment in LatePoint, I was unaware of it. It appears from looking into Astra’s activities that they have been pursuing a plan to make WordPress a compelling option for companies.
