Astra, the creators of the world’s most popular WordPress templates, have announced their investment in LatePoint, a cutting-edge online booking solution that further enhances WordPress as a premier platform for businesses.
This strategic move integrates LatePoint’s powerful scheduling, booking, and payment management capabilities for all users, especially those who utilize Astra.
What Is LatePoint?
LatePoint is a plugin designed to manage the entire online booking and appointment scheduling lifecycle.
It integrates with six different payment gateways:
- Braintree
- Paystack
- PayPal
- Razorpay
- Square
- Stripe
LatePoint also automates common workflow actions like sending email and SMS reminders, synchronizing with third-party calendars, and even automatically creating Zoom meetings. It supports signups via Facebook and Google and integrates with Twilio. Businesses can track performance in the admin dashboard, where all functions are viewable.
Various businesses, from online service providers to hair salons, can use LatePoint to book appointments, schedule them, send reminders, and collect payments seamlessly from one plugin.
The Astra announcement also highlights these capabilities:
"Client database: Maintains a comprehensive client database, providing quick access to client histories, preferences, and contact information for personalized service.
Customizable booking forms: Tailor booking forms to gather specific information from clients, ensuring that appointments are booked with all necessary details."
LatePoint Is Part Of A Larger Strategy
A closer look reveals that Astra is creating a platform within a platform, enabling small businesses to automate various processes to compete on a level playing field with larger organizations. For example, Astra is behind another WordPress plugin called SureTriggers.
SureTriggers facilitates creating event-driven automations between WordPress plugins and third-party SaaS. It offers history logs to track and troubleshoot automations between the linked plugins and third-party SaaS.
SureTriggers supports workplace collaboration for creating automated workflows, custom webhooks, and APIs. It also provides the ability to delay an action, use conditional logic, and apply filters to create complex automations.
Here’s how SureTriggers describes its functionality:
"Easily transfer data between your favorite apps and services like Mailchimp, Gmail, HubSpot, etc. Whatever you need to connect, SureTriggers has you covered.
SureTriggers seamlessly integrates with popular WordPress plugins like Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, Elementor, CartFlows, and many more.
Create multi-step automations that seamlessly execute a sequence of different tasks automatically after a specific event occurs, all customized by you."
Integrating LatePoint’s scheduling and appointment capabilities significantly enhances WordPress as a business platform, enabling small businesses to operate at levels previously unattainable without substantial investment.
All these features are offered at a price accessible to any small business.
Astra Integrates WordPress With Business
A notable aspect is LatePoint’s integration with Astra’s SureCart, positioning Astra as a strong competitor to WooCommerce. Astra also offers Spectra, an intuitive page builder supporting both the classic WordPress editor and Gutenberg blocks.
By combining these tools, Astra is transforming WordPress into a dedicated business CMS while retaining the advantages of the open-source WordPress ecosystem. Astra’s templates, used by over 2.5 million websites worldwide, present a vast pool of potential users or advocates for LatePoint.
This investment signals Astra’s ambition to position WordPress as a top choice for businesses, providing a robust alternative to proprietary closed-source content management systems.
The Astra announcement underscores their mission-driven approach:
"We are excited to share knowledge, implement our ideas, deploy Brainstorm Force processes and work closely with the LatePoint team.
We can’t wait to bring an enterprise-grade, robust, modern, and reliable appointment and booking solution to the small businesses and the larger WordPress community.
One thing that I can’t stress enough is we’re a mission-driven organization. Everything we do is designed to unlock the power of the internet for small businesses."
Tight Integration With Astra Products
Astra is committed to tighter integration between their templates and plugins like the WooCommerce alternative SureCart and SureTriggers. SureTriggers helps WordPress users integrate various tools and plugins to create automated workflows by connecting WordPress to hundreds of SaaS apps and plugins, enabling smooth operation and interconnectivity between different websites and services.
One-Time Payment Pricing Offered For A Limited Time
Astra is offering a lifetime payment deal that provides all the benefits of LatePoint with a one-time payment.
Astra LatePoint Investment
Although LatePoint might be new to some, Astra’s investment in it highlights their strategy to solidify WordPress as a viable business solution.
Read the announcement from WPAstra:
Exciting Announcement: We’re Investing in LatePoint — A Powerful Booking Solution for WordPress
Featured image by Shutterstock/NaMong Productions92
