The Velo Developer Advocates Team recently held a series of webinars on 3rd party integrations designed to help developers discover ways they can extend the capabilities of their Wix sites using Velo.
A few months ago, myself and fellow Velo Developer Advocate Joshua Alphonse had the opportunity to host a series of webinars that shed light on how developers can use Velo to integrate several 3rd party services into their Wix sites.
Over the course of the webinars, we looked at Stripe, SendGrid, and Twilio - three different services that can help users tackle fairly different challenges. Overall, hundreds of people joined the webinars live.
It was a great experience, not only to share our insights directly with users, but also to get their feedback via live chat and to get a better understanding of how they are using these services to enhance their Wix sites.
Our team recently uploaded the recordings of each of these webinars and we’re making them available in this post for anyone who didn’t have a chance to join live.
Keep reading to find out more about each webinar.
Integrate with Third-Party Business Solutions
Our first session, which I hosted, looked at Stripe - a leading online payment platform. Stripe, and some of the solutions we looked at in the webinars, have counterparts that are available with built-in Wix solutions. However, it’s important to remember that many small businesses, and retailers in particular, have already invested in other payment solutions such as Stripe and are deeply integrated into those ecosystems.
So, providing a path for users to move their businesses online, without having to implement an entirely new payment solution is an incredible strength that Velo provides. This is especially important in today’s environment because of the coronavirus, where many stores are moving online in order to sustain their business.
Watch the full session below:
Enhance Your Marketing with Third-Party Services
SendGrid provides developers with a solution for sending transactional emails. This session, hosted by Joshua, showed how SendGrid can help Velo developers beyond simply triggering emails. Joshua commented on the webinar, saying that, “SendGrid is also helpful for providing receipts or password resets. So there is a lot of information for users to take away from the webinar. It goes beyond learning about Velo, and also provides a deeper understanding of the solutions we reviewed.”
Joshua also noted that in the session he hosted, he highlighted the ways Velo can help make integrating 3rd party solutions a more streamlined experience. “Velo gives you the ability to install npm modules so that you can bring complex functionality to your site. They help make your code clean and concise. Some npm modules act as wrappers for an API so there is no need to implement a fetch. It’s really easy to import your back-end functions to your front-end code, you don’t have to create your own back-end elsewhere. It’s all right there.”
Watch the full session below:
Integrate with External Communication Services
While the previous webinars we hosted have a Wix solution counterpart, Twilio brings an entirely new service that is not available out of the box to your Wix Site. In order to incorporate SMS messaging, you must use a 3rd party solution, and Velo enables you to have the flexibility to choose your solution and go with industry leaders like Twilio.
Twilio is one of the most popular developer tools available right now, and in this session we looked at the ways developers can use their Wix Site to send SMS messages to their users. SMS marketing is the leading form of successful marketing campaigns, and having access to incorporate the latest npm modules and 3rd party solutions enables your site to adapt to changing needs for your end users.
Watch the full session below:
Hearing From Users
The webinar series was also a wonderful opportunity to interact directly with users and to hear their feedback and questions about Velo and the 3rd party solutions. The webinar series felt like the start of a learning process for a number of our users and for us as a team. We’re learning so much about our developers and their needs on the platform, and we want to hear more about how we can help grow the Velo platform. Meeting with the community of Velo users helps us understand how much the community wants to learn more about what they can do with the platform and we are looking forward to continuing to engage with them.
Joshua also commented that for many users, the webinars introduced them to the concept of integrating 3rd party solutions with Wix using Velo. “Many of the participants simply weren’t aware this was something they could do. So during the session about Stripe, I recall that some of the participants started asking about integrating with additional payment solutions via npm modules,” he said. “It was a great opportunity to educate users about the full capabilities of Velo and how it can help them leverage a huge number of 3rd party services. I think this really shows off the way Velo can be used to dramatically expand the functionality of the Wix ecosystem beyond what many users were aware of.”
We have a number of additional online presentations coming up, and we’ll update you about them here on the Velo blog. We also look forward to meeting you all again in person when we have the chance to attend offline events in the future.
In the meantime, you can sign up for Velo and start experimenting with the platform and see what you can build with it.
