Wix Automations is a powerful tool that allows site owners and collaborators to automate business processes. As an app developer, you can provide users with both automations and the building blocks they need to create them.
As a site’s traffic increases, it becomes harder for the user to manage certain site actions on their own. For example, a user with an online store doesn’t have time to send invoices manually if they receive dozens of customer orders per day. Likewise, it’s too time-consuming for the owner of a fitness site to manually manage hundreds of new sign-ups daily.
Wix Automations remove the burden of handling these processes from site owners, by automating them. This leaves site owners free to focus on growing their business, instead of dealing with the details of various business operations.
Every automation has a trigger, and at least one action. The trigger is an event that gets reported to Wix by an app. Below are some examples of events that can trigger an automation:
When the app reports the event, it initiates the automation, which then carries out the actions. Each action is a single business operation that can receive data from the trigger. The following are examples of actions:
Triggers and actions are the essential building blocks of automations. However, automations can also contain delays and conditions:
Delays and conditions allow users to build more complex automations than what is possible with just triggers and actions.
Automations Architecture and Data Flow provides more detail about the automation flow and how conditions and delays affect it.
There are two groups that interact with Wix Automations:
By default, every Wix site comes with a basic set of triggers and actions. When a user installs a Wix app on their site, the app can add triggers and actions to this set. This lets the user create a greater variety of automations.
Users create these automations, using the available triggers and actions, in the Automations Builder. The Builder is an intuitive tool located under Automations in your site dashboard.
Users can create automations themselves, but they can also benefit from pre-installed automations, which are added for them by the various apps installed on their site.
Users can’t change the trigger or actions that make up a pre-installed automation, but they can configure some of the actions' settings and may be able to activate or deactivate the automation.
As a developer, you can extend your app with triggers, actions, and pre-installed automations. These extensions become available to users when they install your app on their site. The Automations APIs allow you to work with all three of the options above to provide services to users.
Automations extensions allow you to expose your events as triggers, and your APIs as actions. Site owners can then use these building blocks in the Automation Builder to create their business automations.
As a developer, you can build your own automations using any exposed building blocks. You select the trigger and actions, as well as any conditions and delays, for the user. The user can't change the trigger or actions, but you can allow them to activate or deactivate the automation and make changes to the action configuration. You can also set whether or not users can edit delays and conditions or add their own. These full automations become available to users who install your app.
You create automations extensions in your app dashboard.