Wix Bookings Terminology

Wix Bookings allows business owners to accept and manage bookings for their services.

This article contains a comprehensive list of the various terms and concepts used in all of Wix Bookings and its APIs.

Term	Definition
Appointment	A specific time slot that a customer can book in a calendar. For example, a hair salon is open Monday to Friday from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM. Customers can book a session at any available time during these hours.
Appointment schedule	Defines when customers can book a session for an appointment-based service. Bookings are based on the business’s opening hours, session duration, time between sessions, and staff availability. For example, a hair salon operates Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM, offering 30-minute and 1-hour haircuts. One staff member is available from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and another from 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM, with 15-minute buffers between sessions. Customers can book an appointment if the service and at least one staff member are available, considering the 15-minute buffer before and after the session.
Availability	Free time on an appointment schedule that customers can book.
Booking	Information about the service that the customer has booked. You can think of a booking as an order placed by a customer for a service. Includes details about the time, location, participants, and price.
Business owner	The owner of the business that offers services through Wix. Can be a different person than the site owner. The business owner makes decisions such as confirming or declining a booking.
Calendar	General overview about the availability and bookings of the business, including its services and resources. You can manage appointments, classes, and courses on the calendar.
CANCELED (booking status)	Indicates that the booking has been canceled by the site owner or the customer. Cancel bookings using cancelBooking( ).
Catalog	A list of all the different services a business provides.
Category (service)	A label used to group services, helping business owners, your app, and customers to filter and organize services efficiently.
Checkout	Customers must complete the checkout when booking a service. The checkout is the second stage of the eCommerce purchase flow: cart; checkout; order.
Choice (pricing)	A specific value for a service option that customers can book. For example, the service option ageGroup may have these choices: child, student, adult, and senior. Each choice may have a different price.
Class	A single session or set of sessions offered by a business on specific days and times. Classes can be scheduled on various weekdays, at different times, and with different resources, including staff members. Customers can sign up for one or multiple sessions, unlike courses where all sessions must be booked. For example, a language school offers an open discussion class in Spanish every Monday at 8:00 PM. Customers can book one or multiple sessions of this class.
Class schedule	Before offering a class or course service, the business owner must decide when to schedule sessions. This is in contrast to appointment services, where customers are free to decide when they want to book a session. Wix uses the class schedule to calculate which sessions are still available.
CONFIRMED (booking status)	Indicates that the business owner has confirmed the booking and it appears in the business calendar. You can confirm your bookings in different ways: - Automatically. Bookings are automatically confirmed when the service is set up for automatic confirmation and the order is approved during checkout, including an availability check. - Manually. You can manually confirm a booking using confirmOrDeclineBooking( ).
Course	Courses start and end on pre-defined dates with a limited number of sessions. For example, an academic course or fitness boot camp during the summer holidays. Customers must book all course sessions, while they're free to book only a single or some sessions for classes.
Course schedule	Before offering a course service, the business owner must decide when to schedule sessions. This is in contrast to appointment services, where customers are free to decide when they want to book a session. Wix uses the course schedule to calculate availability, when the first session starts, and when the last session ends.
Deposit	Amount the customer must pay immediately when checking out the booking.
Double booking	A double booking occurs when a customer attempts to book a service that's already reserved. This can happen if multiple customers are checking out simultaneously or if the business owner manually confirms more bookings than the service's capacity allows.
Extended booking	In addition to basic information about the booking, an extended booking contains additional details. For example, attendance details, and whether the customer can demand a refund or reschedule the booking.
External calendar	A calendar hosted by a 3rd-party provider.
External calendar connection	A linkage between a Wix Bookings calendar and one or more external calendars. External calendar connections allow you to import and export calendar events.
External calendar event	A single session or an instance of recurring session that appears in a calendar. For example, an appointment or a class session.
External calendar provider	The 3rd-party service that provides an external calendar such as, Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
External calendar resource	A resource that doesn't have a Wix Bookings calendar. Instead, the resource's availability is managed with an external calendar. For example, your app or the business owner may decide to manage availability through a staff member's Gmail account, and Google calendar.
Form	The booking form that's displayed to customers in the Wix site when they book the service. For example, customers can input their name into the bookings form.
Locked session	A session for a class that customers can't book. For example, because the session is full, has a waitlist, or an administrator needs to manually screen each customer before adding them to the session.
Member	Someone who is a registered member in the Wix site and has a login.
Merchant	The business that offers services to customers. The merchant has a Wix site for their business, unless your app is working with a Headless project (in which case the site is hosted outside of the Wix ecosystem).
Option (pricing)	The pricing possibilities for a service, which can vary based on factors such as the staff member, customer age, appointment time, or type of equipment. Each option has a list of supported choices that may affect the service price or the option may have a uniform price.
PENDING (booking status)	Indicates that the booking is waiting to be confirmed or declined. Bookings in PENDING status are displayed in the business calendar. Bookings are automatically set as PENDING when an eCommerce order related to the booking has been created.
Policy (service)	Rules set by the merchant regarding booking and canceling a service. These may include how far in advance customers can book, the deadline for cancellations, and the maximum number of participants allowed per booking.
Pricing provider	Custom logic that determine the price of a booking via the Custom Pricing service plugin.
Resource	A business asset. For example, a staff member, a room, or equipment that's needed to provide a service. Each resource has a schedule that defines its availability.
Schedule	A collection of all sessions associated with a specific service or resource. It includes information necessary to calculate availability. For more details, see appointment schedule, class schedule, and course schedule.
Service	A business offering, which can be a class, course, or appointment-based. For example, a fitness studio may offer 30-minute 1-on-1 personal training sessions by appointment, 1-hour yoga classes every Monday at 7:00 PM, and introductory HIIT courses consisting of 3 training sessions on specific dates. For more information, see appointment, class, and course.
Status (booking)	Information about the life cycle status of the booking. Statuses include: CREATED, PENDING, CONFIRMED, DECLINED, WAITING_LIST, and CANCELED.
Session	A booked or reserved period of time for an appointment, class, or course. Alternatively, you can consider a session as a specific instance of a service occurring at a particular time. The aggregation of all sessions for a service constitutes the service's schedule.
Slot	A time period available for booking by a customer for a service. In appointment services, this encompasses all available booking times. For classes, it refers to all existing sessions open for booking. Refer to appointment schedule for details on appointment services and class schedule for details on classes.
Service plugin	Service plugins (formerly SPIs) are APIs that are defined by Wix, which you can choose to implement. By doing so, you become a service provider. Then, Wix calls your service during a certain flow, waits for your response, and continues the flow with it. For example, you can offer custom varied pricing options in your Wix site using the Custom Pricing service plugin.
Site owner	The owner of the Wix site that has Wix Bookings installed and all site contributors.
Suggested participant (waitlist)	When a session is fully booked, customers can join the waitlist. If a spot opens up due to a cancellation, the first person on the waitlist (the suggested participant) is notified and given a chance to book the session within a specified time. If they don't book it, the opportunity is passed to the next person on the list.
Variant (pricing)	Unique combination of choices for a service. For example: {"time": "afternoon", "ageGroup": "adult", "equipment": "kettlebells"}. Each variant may have a different price.
Varied pricing	The ability to charge for services based on different factors, such as the staff member who provides the service or the equipment needed.
Visitor	Anyone who isn't registered as a member or hasn't logged in to the Wix site. If a visitor creates a booking they're added as a contact.
WAITING_LIST (booking status)	Indicates that the booking is on a waitlist. Currently, waitlists are available only for classes and not for courses or appointment-based services.
Waitlist	A feature available for class services, allowing customers to request to be added to a fully booked session in case of cancellations. Not available for courses or appointment services.
Waitlist time window	The duration that's given to the suggested participant to book a place in the session before it's offered to the next customer on the waitlist.
Wix Pricing Plans	Prepaid bundles of services or memberships providing customers access to certain services.