Webhooks
Overview
Through the use of webhooks your application can subscribe to events that occur within Violet. Webhooks are an efficient alternative to continuously polling for anticipated events or changes to data.
As an example, a webhook can notify your app when on orders status has changed or a merchant has connected to your app. By being made aware of these events in near-real time your app can instantly react to updates and perform any necessary actions.
We use the phrase near real time to describe the fact that under normal conditions, a Violet webhook will be generated within seconds of an update within an ecom platform. However, this is not guaranteed; Shopify for example says they can take up to 10 minutes to send us the update webhook. Then on top of that, depending on our own system load, we can take a number of minutes to process it on our side before ending with sending out our own webhook to you. So while normally you will see updates coming through fairly quickly there are definitely known scenarios where it can take 10-15 minutes before the webhook ends up going out. Please note that is not a hard upper bound, just and example of how long it could take when our systems are under load.
Therefore, Violet webhooks are not strictly real time, and instead have a small but variable time delay between an update in an e-commerce platform and the webhook delivery to your servers.
Webhook Events
Violet publishes the following Webhook events that your service can subscribe to for near-real time updates:
See our docs on Simulating Webhooks Events docs to get real example webhooks sent to you. This is a great way to view what real payloads look like.
Orders
Catchall event for any updates made to an order. An example of this might be a correction to a shoppers shipping address. These typically have no impact on the lifecycle of the order.
If you are looking to listen to only specific updates, the following webhook events can be subscribed to:
Will trigger when an order is placed by submitting a cart checkout.
Will trigger when an order is fulfilled by a merchant through their commerce platform. This will usually add additional information to the order like tracking data.
Will trigger when part or all of an order has been refunded, without order cancellation or item return.
Will trigger when all or part of an order has been returned, with or without a refund.
Will trigger when all or part of an order has been cancelled, with or without a refund.
Merchants
Will trigger when a merchant completes the Violet Connect onboarding experience and is successfully connected to your app. The data sent to the remote endpoint will contain all non-sensitive data related to that merchant, including their name and merchant ID.
Will trigger when a merchant disconnects from your app.
Will trigger when a existing disabled merchant in Violet is updated to enabled status. May include X-Violet-Reason header with APP_INSTALLED_ON_PLATFORM reason.
Will trigger when a existing enabled merchant in Violet is updated to disabled status. May include X-Violet-Reason header with APP_UNINSTALLED_FROM_PLATFORM or MERCHANT_PLATFORM_PLAN_INACTIVE reason.
Will trigger if the merchant has any INCOMPLETE or NEEDS_ATTENTION items during the connection health check. Example here.
Will trigger once a merchant has completed all required items to begin processing orders, that is, their connection health check has all items marked COMPLETE. Uses the same format as MERCHANT_NEEDS_ATTENTION
Offers
Will trigger when a new offer is created.
Will trigger when an update is made to an offer.
Will trigger when an offer is no longer available for purchase.
Collections
Will trigger when a new collection is created.
Will trigger when an update is made to a collection.
Will trigger when a collection is no longer available.
Will trigger when offers in a collection are added or removed.
Syncs
Will trigger when the merchant’s collections begin syncing.
Will trigger when the merchant’s collections sync is completed.
Will trigger if the merchant’s collections sync fails.
Webhook Headers
Violet provides headers to all webhook calls that help understanding and filtering the events by your service.
Default headers
Signed hmac with your app secret for security validation.
Event topic as defined in Webhook Events section.
Unique event id. This allows your service to process an event just once in case of duplicated delivery.
Related entity id. For example, an offer webhook will have the Violet Offer Id here.
Entity’s length (bytes) in the event body.
Triggered webhook id.
Additional headers
Certain events may have additional headers specific to that webhook type. Current additional headers:
Related order id.
Related bag id.
Event id that was used to resend a webhook.
Additional context as to what triggered the event.
Custom headers
Violet also allows your service to define key-value pairs as headers to be sent together with your webhooks. This allows you to define specific headers to use in any way you desire in your system.
Please refer to Managing Webhook Headers.
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