Automations — Wait

A new Wait node lets an automation pause for a set amount of time — anywhere from 1 minute to 30 days — before continuing to the next step. Use it for things a single instant trigger can’t do on its own: asking for a review a couple of days after delivery, following up on an abandoned cart a few hours later, or escalating an order that’s still stuck after N hours.

Adding a wait

1. Open (or create) an automation. In the node palette on the left you’ll find a Timing group, between Triggers and Conditions, containing the Wait node.
2. Drag it onto the canvas and wire it in — for example, Order placed → Wait → Add order comment.
3. Click the Wait node and set a Duration and a Unit (minutes, hours, or days). It starts at 1 hour. A wait can be at most 30 days; trying to activate with a longer wait shows a validation message telling you to shorten it.
4. Anything you wire after the wait runs once the pause finishes, just like normal.

The rest of the flow re-checks its data

When a wait finishes, the automation looks at the order (or customer, cart, etc.) again before continuing — it doesn’t just resume with the information it had when the wait started. In practice this means:

• A condition placed after a wait evaluates against the current state, not the state when the automation first ran. This is what makes “escalate if the order is still unhandled after 4 hours” work correctly — it checks whether it’s still true, not whether it was true four hours ago.
• If the order (or other record) the automation is waiting on has changed in a way that no longer matches your conditions — for example, it was cancelled — the rest of the flow after the wait won’t run. Nothing runs early and nothing runs against stale data.

The Wait node’s config panel repeats this in plain English so it’s visible right where you set the duration.

Watching a run wait and resume

Open the Run history panel while a run is paused at a wait:

• The run shows a waiting badge, with a line saying roughly when it resumes.
• Expand the run to see the individual steps — the Wait step itself shows as waiting until the pause finishes, then flips to success.
• Once the wait completes, any steps after it appear in the same run’s step list, and the run’s overall status updates once everything downstream has finished.

If you pause or edit the automation while a run is waiting

A run that’s mid-wait is tied to the exact automation you activated. If you pause the automation, or edit and re-activate it, before the wait finishes:

• That in-flight run is cancelled, not resumed into your changes — the Wait step shows a plain-English reason why, and no downstream actions run.
• This is deliberate: resuming a paused run into a flow you’ve since changed (or turned off) would mean it fires actions you no longer intended.
• Re-activating the automation and triggering a fresh run works normally — only runs that were already waiting when you paused/edited are affected.

Good to know

• A wait node works under any trigger, not just order triggers — it’s fine to use it after “Cart abandoned” or any other trigger type.
• A wait that has nothing wired after it is flagged by the validation panel (“This wait leads nowhere.”) — add an action after it, or remove it.
• Minutes are supported specifically so you can test a wait-based automation in under two minutes rather than waiting hours or days to confirm it works, before switching the duration to something realistic.

Source: modernx-admin PR #422.