BigCommerce Webhooks Integration: 5 Easy Steps

Today, both small and large scale enterprises are adopting the Digital Shopping trend and rapidly expanding their business by setting up their Online Stores. They enjoy a wider global audience as well as the numerous online tools available to improve their business and the user experience on their Ecommerce Website. BigCommerce such an Ecommerce platform that allows you to create a personalised Website and sell your products online.

BigCommerce offers a huge range of features that makes building an Ecommerce Website a seamless process. One of its time-saving features is the BigCommerce Webhooks. Instead of manually checking for any updates on the orders, refunds, payments, etc, the BigCommerce Webhooks notifies you whenever an event occurs such as a product being purchased. 

In this article, you will learn how to effectively set up your BigCommerce Webhooks Integration for your Online Shop.    

Table of Contents

• Introduction to BigCommerce
  • Key Features of BigCommerce
• Introduction to Webhooks
• Steps to set up BigCommerce Webhooks Integration
• Conclusion

Introduction to BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a leading Ecommerce Platform that provides a complete package of tools to seamlessly create and run an online store for your business. Launched in 2009, BigCommerce is now assisting more than 60,000 business owners across 150+ countries. With a plethora of features available, you can design and customize your online shop and start selling your products across the globe in no time. You get full control over your website and can perform various operations such as adding Products, Uploading Photos, Processing Orders, Creating Discount Coupons, Customizing Product Pages, etc.   

As this is a completely hosted service, you aren’t required to buy or manage web hosting. You can simply connect to the Internet, sign in to BigCommerce and start designing your Ecommerce website. Keeping the interest of Developers in mind, you can also make tweaks in the CSS and HTML to personalize the website according to your style. BigCommerce offers a range of subscription-based plans that cater to the needs of both small and large-sized enterprises. 

Key Features of BigCommerce

This SaaS platform is employed by various industries like electronics, healthcare products, jewelry, etc. Its huge popularity comes from the following eye-catching features:

• Manageability: From the beginning when you land on the BigCommerce Dashboard, clear instructions are provided to help you through the basics. Processing Orders, Managing your Inventory and Updating your Stock Levels is a smooth process. The multi-currency support allows you to reach a wider audience and accept payments worldwide. You can even set rules for automatic tax calculation. BigCommerce allows you to segment your customers based on various filters such as pricing, product access, etc.
• Themes: BigCommerce offers a diverse collection of both free and paid templates. Using the Style Editor, you can customize these themes without any need for writing code. All of these themes are 100% optimized for all mobile devices providing the best customer experience.
• SEO: The Search Engine Optimization functionality of BigCommerce optimizes your website with the improved loading speed and better ranks on the search engines. Following the most up-to-date SEO practices, it puts continuous efforts to improve your website UX. It provides you access to Metadata, Header Tags, Titles, URLs, etc for customization according to your content.  
• Marketing: With robust tools such as Mailchimp, HubSpot, iContact and Constant Contact you send Automated emails, Coupon codes, Discounts, etc. Through BigCommerce, you can also market on various Social Media Channels such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. With a fluid Google Adwords integration, you can promote your brand and products on Google also. The analytics tools help you keep a close eye on your business performance and provide deeper insights for making data-driven strategic decisions.    
• Customer Support: BigCommerce provides excellent 24/7 customer support via phone, live chat, and email to solve your queries. The subject experts analyse your inquiries and provide the best possible solution in short wait times. By opting for the Enterprise Plan, you get additional features with priority support. To know more the customer support, you can visit the BigCommerce Support Center. 

Introduction to Webhooks

A Webhook is a way for an app to communicate with other apps. Using Webhooks you can send Real-Time automated messages or information from one application to another whenever an event occurs. If an event takes place in the application, you will be notified automatically.

This communication happens using the Webhooks URL i.e an address or a phone number of the notification receiving application. 

When an event is triggered, data(payload) is sent to the receiving app in JSON or XML format. For example, in an Ecommerce Store, an event could be a customer buying a product. As soon as this happens, an HTTP request will be made to the URL and the data containing the product name, cost, etc., could be sent to you. You can easily achieve this in BigCommerce by setting up the BigCommerce Webhooks Integration.

Prerequisites

• An active BigCommerce account.
• Knowledge of Webhooks.

Steps to set up BigCommerce Webhooks Integration

Whenever any of the BigCommerce Webhooks Events are triggered, a response is sent to your application associated with the BigCommerce Webhooks URL you have provided. To set up BigCommerce Webhooks for your Online Store, follow these steps given below:

• Step 1: Log in to your BigCommerce Control Panel.
• Step 2: Navigate to Advanced Settings > API Accounts.
• Step 3: Click on the Create API Account button. Type in the Name and choose the API resources you would need to access.

The API path will be displayed in the following fashion: https://api.bigcommerce.com/stores/<storehash>/v3

• Step 4: Click on the Save Button. From the Credentials dialog box, save the details such as Access Token, Store Hash, Client ID, Client Secret, and the API Account Name.
• Step 5: Now in the BigCommerce environment, you can send a POST request to /stores/{{STORE_HASH}}/v2/hooks.

POST https://api.bigcommerce.com/stores/{{STORE_HASH}}/v2/hooks
X-Auth-Token: {{ACCESS_TOKEN}}
Content-Type: application/json
Accept: application/json

{
  "scope": "store/order/updated",
  "destination": "https://665b65a6.ngrok.io/webhooks",
  "is_active": true
}

In the above code, you have the following elements:

• BigCommerce Webhooks URL
• Headers
  • X-Auth-Token: Access Token for authentication that allows the app to access the resources.
  • Content-Type: Defines the format type of the request body.
  • Accept: Defines the acceptable format type of the response.
• Body
  • scope: BigCommerce Webhooks Event. 
  • destination: Your application’s URL. It is necessary that this URL is served on port 443.   
  • Is_active: This sets the BigCommerce Webhooks On or Off.

Here, you can replace STORE_HASH and ACCESS_TOKEN with values you saved earlier from the API Accounts.

After sending the request, you will get the following response:

{
"created_at": 1580329317,
  "destination": "https://665b65a6.ngrok.io/webhooks", // note: custom ports are not supported
  "headers": null,
  "id": 20172984,
  "is_active": true,
  "scope": "store/order/*",
  "store_hash": "{{STORE_HASH}}",
  "updated_at": 1580329317
}

Now that your BigCommerce Webhooks Integration is set up, BigCommerce will POST the following payload to the destination server whenever the “Order Updated” Event is triggered.

{
 "store_id":11111,
 "producer":"stores/abcde",
 "scope":"store/order/statusUpdated",
 "data":{
         "type":"order",
         "id":173331
        },
 "hash":"3f9ea420af83450d7ef9f78b08c8af25b2213637"
 }

To confirm that the payload is successfully delivered, the destination server must return an HTTP  200 response. In case of failure, it can return a value outside the 200 range or no value at all. Then the BigCommerce Webhooks Service will retry and send the payload again in succession across a 2-minute window. When the BigCommerce Webhooks service receives a 2xx response, the success count increases otherwise decreases. Based on the Success/Failure ratio, the service decides if the Webhook is blacklisted.

If it is not blacklisted, then the BigCommerce Webhooks service will retry numerous times till the next 48 hours after which it will be deactivated if no response is received.

To reactivate the Webhook, you can make a PUT request to /hooks/{id} and set is_active as true. This will re-establish your BigCommerce Webhooks Integration.

Conclusion

In this article, you have learned how to effectively set up your BigCommerce Webhooks Integration for your Ecommerce Website. BigCommerce provides an easy-to-use Ecommerce Website Building Platform that allows you to design your Online Shop. With the elegant BigCommerce features, you can Customize your web pages, Manage Payments, Process Orders, Promote your Products on Social Media, etc. Using the BigCommerce Webhooks Integration, you can stay updated with real-time event notifications. Since this is a hosted service, you can access your Online Store anywhere, anytime, and from any mobile device. 

Businesses managing Ecommerce Websites often use several other applications across various departments for Marketing, Accounting, Human Resources, Customer Relationship Management, etc. An astronomical amount of data is generated within all these applications and efficient manual handling of massive volumes of data can be a challenging task. You would require to invest a section of your engineering bandwidth to Integrate, Clean, Transform and Load your data into your Data Warehouse for further business analysis. All of this can be comfortably solved by a Cloud-Based ETL tool like Hevo Data. 

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Share with us your experience of setting up the BigCommerce Webhooks Integration. Let us know in the comments section below!