In this article, we would like to share our experience building an Integromat App for PayPal Invoicing. We were compelled to share this experience, as we have witnessed a 0 to 1 in 2 factor (to understand what it means please read till end). Though it’s quite simple for tech savvy minded to build such an app, small business users that require to have such technicalities shielded, could still benefit from using our app directly.
The first step is getting acquainted with the process of writing a new app for Integromat app and their docs section is great place for this: https://docs.integromat.com/apps/. The docs are so simple and, easy to read and understand. They have couple of sample apps that can be used as reference. To start with, we aimed to have one action to let the user create the PayPal Invoicing leveraging the powerful entegrations.io back-end, and a webhook that can help user receive notification when the invoice is paid.
Integromat offers both web based IDE to edit the sections of the App as well as Visual Studio Code based plugin. Both are quite quick and easy to use. The following two screenshots are provided to give you an idea how they look.
As part of developing this app, few configuration steps were also performed on the highly configurable back end system of entegrations.io. We didn’t have to make any code changes on top of our existing platform, because of our earlier work on treading down similar platforms and the architecture put together to support use cases like this one. We just had to make couple of quick chores on PayPal platform for our setup with them; all, just in a matter of few minutes. Changes made to the app can be easily tested by applying to the Integromat scenarios.
The integration testing in sandbox involved to use our app to create two scenarios. One, to create an invoice based on some test data from another app called Gmail. Another one, for the invoice paid notification, as received as part of trigger/webhook. The payload in this scenario would send an email using Gmail app, just for proving the concept.
This app is currently being tried by our users on Integromat. This is a great way for small business users (having no technical background) on Integromat to be able to quickly automate their invoicing process with PayPal. Here is the link for the app to get started: https://www.integromat.com/en/apps/invite/d8333222a0ffddad42ab797faad80834
It took a total of 16 hours to build an app from scratch and test end to end, with Sandbox accounts. This effort of time includes the reading up on how the platform works and how the apps are built. Hence the 0 in the title. The 16 hours end-to-end, nothing but 2 business days, leads to the 2 in the title of this article.
