Since the pandemic, many small and medium-sized companies are looking to expand their presence in the online market space. Leading E-commerce platforms like Shopify are allowing companies to set up an online store and sell their products. Shopify helps customers to create, develop, and maintain aesthetically pleasing E-Commerce websites that also support mobile devices. To further allow shop owners to implement effective business initiatives with real-time website data, it offers Webhook. Shopify Webhook helps you to keep in sync with Shopify or run code in response to a specific event in the store.
When you generate a new order or customer, for example, other systems will be able to actively absorb data from CRM once it becomes available. Webhooks, in particular, saves this information which can later be used to get a better understanding of the order request made by the customer and determine what subsequent steps to ensure a smooth checkout or suggest a discount, etc.
This blog will provide an overview of the Shopify and Shopify Webhook features.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
- An idea of the E-Commerce business model.
- Understanding of CMS.
Introduction to Shopify
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Shopify is a prominent E-Commerce platform that assists merchants in starting a new business by assisting them in creating their online store and offers assistance on business ideas and strategies. It is an ideal platform for entrepreneurs who want to turn their business idea into a reality with just a few clicks.
Shopify assists businesses in every manner possible to achieve their organizational goals, from branding to choosing a theme to offering all Sales methods.
Moreover, Shopify supports over 70 different payment gateways and checkouts in over 50 different languages. It makes it simple for businesses all around the world to expand into new markets. Shopify also has a multitude of Shopify Integrations and Plugins in their Shopify App Store to further assist you in enhancing the functionality of your online store.
Key Features and Benefits
- Security: Shopify is PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant and comes with SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certifications to secure data. This guarantees a secure connection, fast page loading, and a fully hosted solution.
- Customer Support: Shopify’s customer service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by phone, chat, and email. Domain Experts in Customer Support can answer any of your questions regarding Shopify and operating a shop. Shopify Customer Support’s online resources are another significant strength.
- Shopify Analytics: This aids users in analyzing and comprehending the performance of their online shops. Shopify provides a variety of tools that produce important information such as Total Sales, Total Customer Visits, Visitor Demographics, and more to help users better understand their business.
- Scalability: Shopify is well-equipped to manage big quantities of traffic and orders when it comes to business scalability. When your business grows, you can easily upgrade your Shopify subscription plans without compromising on any benefits. Shopify Plus, a Cloud-based infrastructure intended for resilience and 99.99% uptime, is another excellent solution for large companies.
- POS: Companies may sell their items in the real world with Shopify’s Point Of Sale (POS). The Shopify POS application has a single dashboard that eliminates the need to keep track of In-store and Online Sales separately. Users may modify orders, view customer purchase history, and add discount offers via the app.
- Pricing: You may pick from five different pricing tiers, ranging from $9 to over $2000 each month. Fortunately, this plan covers both domain name and hosting costs, so you won’t have to worry about purchasing them individually.
- Templates: It provides aesthetically appealing and well-designed themes and layouts. You can easily customize your website and make it user-friendly with features like Product Filters, Live Search, and Drop-Down Menus by choosing from over 100 ideal online shop template designs.
What is Shopify Webhook?
A Webhook in Shopify is a feature that allows a website to send notifications to other systems when certain events occur. In other words, when an event happens, Webhooks will send you a push notification. Consequently, you do not have to make API calls to see if these events have occurred. Webhooks let you provide a URL to which the Webhook provider should deliver requests. The event data will be posted to the URL specified in one of two formats: JSON (regular) or XML.
Users leverage webhooks to collect data that can be used for:
- Notifying shippers or business owners about orders.
- Payment software integration.
- Changes in the price of a product or service.
- Removing customer data from their database, in case they uninstall the app.
Working with Shopify Webhooks
If a certain event occurs on your Shopify shop, Webhooks are delivered to their respective applications as a notification, where each message includes a JSON (or XML) file as well as information in the HTTP headers. To receive these alerts, an app creates a data object known as a ‘Webhook Subscription‘ using the REST Admin API or the GraphQL Admin API.
The information about the issue in question (i.e., the event that triggers the webhook) as well as the app that receives the information is provided by the Shopify Webhook subscription.
To begin, your app is subscribed to one of these topics:
- Cart
- Collection
- Checkout
- Collection Publication
- Customer
- Customer Saved Search
- Draft Order
- Fulfilment
- Fulfillment Event
- Inventory Item
- Inventory Level
- Location
- Order
- Order Transaction
- Product
- Product Listing
- Refund
- Shop
- Shop Alternate Locale
- Tender Transaction
- Theme
To learn more about each of the events listed above, please visit Shopify Webhook documentation.
It is important to note that Webhooks are different from APIs. API necessitates that we submit a request to the server, and the server returns data to your system or application. Webhooks, on the other hand, always send data to the URL as long as they’re available. Webhooks send POST HTTP requests to the third-party application or server when an event is triggered. Data about orders can change every minute; webhooks help developers to utilize the real-time data for improving customer experience once the application gets a POST request.
How to Configure a Webhook?
You must register an HTTPS endpoint on your app as a Webhook Receiver in order to accept Webhooks. Then, define your endpoint and the Shopify Webhook subject you want to receive in a Webhook Subscription. When an event for the subscribed topic happens, Shopify delivers a JSON or XML Payload to your app. A copy of the item that caused the event is included in the payload.
Webhook Subscriptions are only applicable to the app for which they were created. This implies that once a Webhook Subscription has been registered to an app, it cannot be seen, modified, or deleted by other apps.
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Setting up the Shopify Webhook
You can set up a Shopify Webhook subscription using either the Admin API or the Shopify Admin:
Method 1: Configuring Shopify Webhooks Using REST Admin API
An HTTP POST call to the /admin/api/2021-01/webhooks.json endpoint is required to set up a Webhook using the REST Admin API. The request body should have a topic property, which is the event that will initiate the subscription, and an address property, which is the endpoint that will receive Shopify’s alerts when the Webhook is activated.
POST /admin/api/2021-01/webhooks.json
-d '{"webhook":
"topic": "orders/create",
"address": "https://example.hostname.com/",
"format": "json"
"Fields":["id","note"]
}
}
-X POST "https://your-development-store.myshopify.com/admin/api/2021-10/webhooks.json"
-H "X-Shopify-Access-Token: {access_token}"
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Parameters Required for Shopify Webhook Set-up
- Format: It is an optional parameter that specifies the notification payload’s format.
- Address: It refers to the destination URI to which the Webhook Subscription should send the POST request when an event occurs.
- Topic: It is an event that triggers the webhook.
- Field: An optional array of top-level resource fields to serialize and send with the POST request. If a field is left blank, all fields will be delivered.
- ID: Unique numeric identifier for the Webhook Subscription.
Note: You can also update a Shopify Webhook subscription’s Topic or address URIs using PUT.
-d '{"webhook":
{
"id":4759306,"address":"https://somewhere-else.com/"}}'
-X PUT "https://your-development-store.myshopify.com/admin/api/2021-10/webhooks/4759306.json"
-H "X-Shopify-Access-Token: {access_token}"
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The Shopify Webhook is ready to use!
Method 2: Configuring Shopify Webhooks Using the Shopify Admin
- Go to the Admin Dashboard’s settings and select notification.
- Click the Create Webhook button after scrolling down to the Webhooks section.
- A new window should open.
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- From the first drop-down menu, choose the “Event” option.
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- Choose the format (JSON or XML) in which Shopify should provide you this information from the second drop-down menu.
- Under URL, enter the URL where you would like data to be stored.
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Your Shopify Webhook is ready!
It’s worth noting that Webhooks can’t be sent to the following addresses:
- URLs that end with the word “internal.”
- To any localhost.
- Domain names of Shopify.
- Fake domains.
- Any custom domain attached to the store.
You can now see your Shopify Webhook displayed in the Webhooks field.
- In the Notifications field, look for the Webhooks section.
- Make sure you’re tapping the Send Test Notice button next to the Webhook you want to test.
Deleting Webhooks from Shopify
- Go to Settings > Notifications in your Shopify Admin.
- Scroll down to Webhooks.
- A little ‘trash can’ symbol should appear next to the Webhook you generated.
- To delete the webhook, click the ‘Trash Can’ symbol.
The same action can be performed for the first method Shopify Webhook: Using REST admin API
-X DELETE "https://your-development-store.myshopify.com/admin/api/2021-10/webhooks/4759306.json"
-H "X-Shopify-Access-Token: {access_token}"
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Conclusion
This blog must have helped you gain a better understanding of Shopify and its features, particularly for Shopify Webhook. Webhook is a great feature that can power your Shopify Store by notifying you of an event so that you (or an automatically running application) may be alerted and act on the event.
You might wish to take your business growth a step further after learning about the Shopify Webhook by employing Data Analytics techniques on your Shopify data. This will necessitate the deployment of different complex ETL techniques to transfer data from Shopify to a Data Warehouse.
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Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline, provides you with a consistent and reliable solution to manage data transfer between a variety of sources such as Shopify, Shopify Webhooks and a wide variety of Desired Destinations with a few clicks.
Hevo Data with its strong integration with 100+ Data Sources (Including 40+ Free Sources like Shopify) allows you to not only export data from your desired data sources & load it to the destination of your choice, but also transform & enrich your data to make it analysis-ready so that you can focus on your key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools. It helps transfer data from Shopify and Shopify Webhooks to a destination of your choice for free. Hevo further supports a Native Webhooks Connector that helps you load data from non-native and custom sources for free, without writing any code!
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Share your experience of learning about Shopify Webhooks in the comment section below!
Preetipadma is passionate about freelance writing within the data industry, expertly delivering informative and engaging content on data science by incorporating her problem-solving skills.