Why a webhook

Fewer moving parts than an app

An installed app needs permissions to your order data, updates itself on its own schedule, and adds another vendor with standing access to your store. A webhook is a single URL that Shopify calls when something happens. You can see it, change it and remove it yourself from the admin, and it grants nobody ongoing access to anything.

It also means there is nothing to break during a theme change, nothing to reinstall after a migration, and no app subscription sitting alongside your FeedbackHub account.

The one trade-off is that setup is a manual step rather than a one-click install. It takes about ten minutes and we are happy to do it with you on a call.

Setup

Five steps in the Shopify admin

Publish your feedback form

Build the form you want Shopify customers to see and publish it. A draft form will not accept responses, and the integration will report that it is unpublished rather than sending requests to a dead link.

Create the integration in FeedbackHub

Add an integration, choose Shopify as the provider, select the form and the channel. Copy the webhook URL that is generated. It contains a secret unique to your account, so treat it like a password.

Add the webhook in Shopify

In your Shopify admin, open Settings, then Notifications, and find the webhook section. Create a webhook, paste the URL, and set the format to JSON.

Choose the event

Order fulfilment is the usual choice for physical products, because it fires when the order actually ships. Order payment suits digital goods and services. Order creation fires earliest and is rarely the right moment to ask about an experience that has not happened yet.

Test with a real order

Place a small order with your own email address and take it through to the event you selected. The request should arrive and the integration's event counter should tick over. Shopify also lets you send a test notification, which confirms the URL is reachable before any real order is involved.

What is read

The fields FeedbackHub takes from a Shopify order

The webhook payload Shopify sends is large. FeedbackHub reads only what it needs to send a request and attribute the response: the customer's email address, their phone number if present, their first and last name, and the order number.

Everything else in the payload, including line items, prices, addresses and payment information, is ignored. The feedback request does not need to know what was bought in order to ask how it went.

If a payload arrives with neither an email address nor a phone number, which happens with certain manual or point of sale orders, the request is skipped and the event is still counted so you can see it came through.

Customer email address
Customer phone number, when present
First and last name, used in the greeting
Order number, stored against the response

Shopify POS as well as online

If you use Shopify POS in a physical shop, orders taken at the counter flow through the same webhook, provided a customer with contact details is attached to the sale.

For walk-in customers where no details are captured, there is nothing to send a request to. That is the case where a printed QR card on the counter earns its place, since it collects feedback from exactly the customers the integration cannot reach.

Many retailers run both and compare the two channels in the same report.

Timing a Shopify feedback request

Fulfilment is when Shopify says the parcel has left, not when it arrives. Depending on your courier and your market, that can be a gap of one day or five, and asking a customer to rate a product they have not yet received produces confusion rather than data.

Two approaches work in practice. The simpler one is to trigger on fulfilment and accept that your feedback skews slightly early, which is fine for fast local delivery. The more accurate one is to trigger from your own fulfilment or tracking system once delivery is confirmed, using the generic webhook rather than the Shopify event, so the request lands the day after the customer actually has the product in their hands.

If you sell digital products, subscriptions or services, none of this applies. Payment is the completion event and there is no delivery delay to account for.

Keeping it working

Shopify disables webhooks that repeatedly fail to receive a successful response, so a webhook that has been quiet for a while is worth checking in the admin as well as in FeedbackHub. The integration's last event timestamp tells you whether the calls are still arriving.

If you change stores, migrate to a new Shopify plan or rebuild the store, the webhook does not travel with the theme. It is defined at the store level and needs recreating on the new one. That is a two-minute job, but it is easy to forget in the middle of a migration, and it is a common reason feedback volume silently drops to nothing.

How this differs from a Shopify product reviews app

Product review apps and feedback platforms are frequently confused, and they solve different problems. It is worth being clear about which one you actually need, because buying the wrong one is a common and expensive mistake.

A product reviews app collects public opinions about individual products and displays them on your product pages. Its purpose is conversion: a shopper who sees forty reviews on a pair of boots is more likely to buy the boots. The reviews are public by design and they live on your storefront.

FeedbackHub collects private operational feedback about the experience of buying from you. Its purpose is diagnosis and reputation: finding out that delivery is slow, that the returns process confuses people, or that a particular courier is losing you customers, and separately making sure your happy customers end up on the review profile that appears in local search results.

Most stores benefit from both, and they do not conflict. The product reviews app answers "is this product good", which lives on the product page. FeedbackHub answers "was buying from this shop a good experience", which lives in your reporting and, for the satisfied customers, on your public business profile.

Using Shopify order tags and notes

The webhook payload includes everything Shopify sends about an order, and FeedbackHub only reads what it needs. That leaves room for a useful pattern: if you want to separate types of order in your reporting, run more than one integration and point each at a different form.

For example, a store that sells both physical goods and digital downloads has two very different experiences to measure, and averaging them together produces a number that describes neither. Two integrations, two forms, one dashboard, and the per-form summary does the comparison for you.

The same applies to markets. If you sell into several countries with different couriers, separating them makes delivery complaints attributable to the right supplier rather than smeared across your overall score.

We will set the webhook up with you

Share your screen for ten minutes and we will configure the webhook, choose the right event for what you sell, and run a test order end to end.

Request a quote Look at the features first

Shopify feedback requests without installing an app