Last week, we had the pleasure of participating in, and sponsoring WordPress meetup in Saigon. This meetup revolved around WordPress e-commerce. We both presented and learned a lot.
46 people attended the event, including veteran developers and newbies. Through the sessions and audience questions, we can see a clear and exciting picture of where this market is heading.
E-Commerce for small businesses is big in Vietnam
Our own Dat opened the meetup with a presentation of WooCommerce. The session covered the basics of using WooCommerce and was intended for both business owners, looking to add a store to their sites, as well as developers, who haven’t used WooCommerce yet.
Dat’s presentation included showcase sites both from Vietnam, as well as other countries. It also covered the basic WooCommerce concepts and the steps to setup a store.
Binh Dang gave a session on how to build themes for WooCommerce. The audience was interested both in this subject and also in the wider topic of how to develop custom WordPress themes. We are planning to offer a lot more on theme development in the upcoming meetups.
Toai Tran’s session on payment gateways presented local Vietnamese payment methods. This subject is very important to build real commercial sites. Without being able to receive payments, no sales are possible.
Lam Phong’s presentation ‘The content for an e-commerce site’ was one of the most interesting presented during the meetup. The speaker, presenting real life case studies, helped the audience to understands what the high-quality content of website is.
During all WooCommerce sessions, the audience showed an interest in delivery options, Vietnamese payment options and localization. Fortunately, WooCommerce covers all these very well, allowing local business to sell their products both domestically and abroad.
Global E-Commerce using WooCommerce Multilingual
Dat’s second session covered WooCommerce Multilingual. This is indeed an advanced topic. We believe that as more Vietnamese e-commerce sites are built and vendors open their services to international markets, this subject will pick up in importance too.
Next Meetups — more for developers, marketers and site owners
The next meetup in Saigon will be on Saturday, May 24th. This meetup will have two additional guests from OnTheGoSystems:
- Andrea Sciamanna — WPML’s lead developer
- Amir Helzer — Company CTO
We will use this opportunity to go deeper into advanced development subjects, which can help anyone building sites with WordPress. If you develop sites for clients, themes or plugins, we promise you that you will have something interesting and useful to learn.
In addition to traditional presentations we plan to arrange a workshop. Workshops allow for in-depth learning.
Session suggestions:
- Best practices in theme development
- How to use plugins efficiently to speed up development
- How to to build sites for multilingual audience
- How to promote your sites on search engines and directories
- How to optimize your site for best performance
All new session suggestions are welcome. Feel free to add in a comment what you would like to learn.
If you want to talk about something which can help many other people, please submit your session idea and apply to be a speaker in the Meetup event page.