Webhook Architecture

Overview

Webhooks are HTTP callbacks used by commerce platforms (Shopify, Stripe) to push real-time event notifications to your application. Reliable webhook infrastructure requires: HMAC signature verification to prevent spoofed events, idempotent handlers that tolerate duplicate delivery, exponential backoff retry logic, and a dead-letter queue for events that exhaust all retries. This skill covers building a reliable webhook receiver and, for custom platforms, a webhook sender using the Outbox Pattern.

When to Use This Skill

• When receiving webhooks from Shopify, Stripe, Square, or other platforms
• When debugging missed events or duplicate processing caused by webhook delivery issues
• When building a commerce platform or app that needs to notify external systems of events
• When designing event-driven architecture between commerce microservices
• When setting up webhook fanout (single event delivered to multiple consumers)

Core Instructions

Step 1: Determine your platform and what webhooks you need to handle