The Wix eCommerce platform is an extendable and pluggable set of services that allows any business to sell online. Businesses can use the eCommerce platform to sell anything to anyone, including goods, services, and subscriptions.

You can customize the platform for your use case by extending or replacing pieces of the platform using extension points (such as APIs and SPIs), as well as other new and upcoming features (such as data extensions and app reflow).

A typical purchase flow that uses the Wix eCommerce platform includes the following components:

The catalog describes and maintains inventory of the goods or services being sold. This can include products, services, gift cards, pricing plans, and more. The catalog can also contain unique, one-off items that are tailor-made for each transaction, such as project work.

Once customers have found items they want to purchase, they can add them to their cart. The cart is the buyer's basket of items they want to buy and can include custom validation to proceed to checkout, such as discount conditions, shipping weight limits, or quantity thresholds.

Some purchasing flows bypass the cart entirely and proceed directly to checkout.

Checkout is the page where buyers make their purchase. The checkout experience can be customized, extended, and replaced to suit the needs of the business.

The payments page is where buyers pay for their purchase. Wix offers several options for handling payments, including Wix Pricing Plans, Payments by Wix, or Rise.ai Gift Cards. Alternatively, businesses can integrate as a payment provider to enable site owners to use their platform to handle payments.

After customers complete their purchase, they'll be redirected to a thank you page that confirms the payment and thanks the user for their purchase.

Orders are managed through the orders component, which allows apps or site owners to manage the order lifecycle, including viewing, editing, approving, canceling, and charging.

Finally, the fulfillment component is the final step of the process that gets the items to the buyer. It can include physical products, digital products, services, or anything else the catalog holds.

The Notifications service in Wix eCommerce plays a vital role in keeping site owners up-to-date with critical events throughout the buying process. This service sends alerts to site owners when specific events take place, such as a successful or failed payment, the creation of an order that requires approval, or fulfillment events. Notifications keep site owners informed and help them stay on top of orders, ensuring a smooth buying experience for their customers.

You can extend or integrate parts of the eCommerce platform using various extension points. These extension points allow verticals, apps, and site owners to integrate custom solutions without having to recreate entire services.

Here are some of the extension points available:

• Client APIs and SPIs can be used to integrate custom solutions and extend the platform's core functionality.
• UI slots enable apps to customize the information presented to users without recreating entire preinstalled pages, while reflow allows you to change the site's flow to completely replace preinstalled pages.
• Data extensions (upcoming) allow you to enrich objects with custom data.
• Dashboard pages can present essential data and give site contributors control over specific settings.

As always, site owners can also build their own experiences with the Velo eCommerce APIs and SPIs.