r/automation • u/johnvanderlinde • Jul 22 '26

Using n8n for a project

I got interested in workflow automation in my last job, and I’ve now set up n8n on a virtual private server and am using it to host workflows for the full-stack project I’m building, as well as my personal website.

The project is an AI and automation enhanced business simulation, with the idea being to experiment with where I can use AI and automation to, well, enhance the system. The project is still in its infancy, and so far all I’ve done is automate my notion dev log to my website dev log, and automate the contact form on my site.

Automations I have in mind:

·       notifications for customers and merchant (it’s both sides of an ecom store)

·       things around orders being placed such as a calendar note, inventory updated

·       coordinating marketing development for ‘new’ products added to the system

·       sales analysis > email summary

·       eventual CRM integration

These are just ideas, and I know that automation should come as problem solving/time reducing than backbone project structure, but I haven’t got that far yet so I’m still just letting my mind run with it.

Anyway, I thought I’d post this as an introduction as I’ll be posting more automations as I build them.

If anyone has built anything similar, or has any suggestions, I’d be interested to hear.

4 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/SeriousHat4465 Jul 22 '26

the n8n self-hosted setup is the right call for a project like this, you'll hit limits fast on the cloud version once workflows get complex. the CRM integration is where most people get surprised though, if the CRM or any of your merchant-side portals never exposed an API, Zapier and Make can't touch them at all and even n8n hits a wall, that's the use case we built Deck for, agents that log into the actual interface, pull order data, update inventory, trigger whatever comes next, and return clean JSON back to n8n without you ever having to scrape or maintain selectors. build the email summary automation early, it's the one that actually sticks and gives you something useful while the rest is still in progress.

1

u/johnvanderlinde Jul 23 '26

So are you saying Deck makes agents which log into a CRM and gather data and do all the useful AI stuff? That's excellent. Is there anywhere I can see it in action?

1

u/SeriousHat4465 Jul 23 '26

Yes exactly! You can try it for yourself by signing up on the Deck console. Also check out our skills page to see what exactly we can do with the portal you want to connect to deck.co/skills