Shopify Glossary Terms

Webhooks are automated HTTP notifications that Shopify sends to a specified URL when events happen in your store. When a customer places an order, Shopify fires an order/created webhook. When a product is updated, it fires a product/update webhook. Your systems receive these notifications in real time and act on them.

This is the foundation of real-time integrations. Instead of polling Shopify's API every few minutes to check for changes (which is slow and wasteful), webhooks push data to your systems the moment something happens. Order placed? Your 3PL gets notified immediately. Inventory changes? Your website updates within seconds.

For Shopify Plus brands with complex integration stacks, reliable webhook handling is critical. That means building webhook endpoints with proper error handling, retry logic, and idempotency (handling the same webhook twice without creating duplicate records). Many integration failures we see during audits trace back to webhook infrastructure that wasn't built to handle edge cases.

Think: Shopify tapping your systems on the shoulder the moment something happens.