Webhooks

The webhooks ecommerce integration built into UltraCart lets your own servers, apps, and automation platforms react to store events the moment they happen, without polling. Subscribe to the events you care about, and UltraCart pushes a JSON payload to your endpoint within seconds of each change: new orders, payment results, subscription rebills, shipments, fulfillment transmissions, item updates, customer changes, chargebacks, and more.

Webhooks are an outbound callback from UltraCart to your server. That architecture is fundamentally more efficient than hitting the REST API on a timer, because nothing has to ask "did something change?" repeatedly. Your app sits idle until an event occurs, UltraCart posts the JSON, your handler runs, and the loop completes. For any real-time integration, from a custom shipping system to an internal dashboard to a partner app, webhooks are what make the connection feel instantaneous instead of delayed.

Configuration lives under Home → Configuration → Development → Webhooks. Each webhook has a target URL (HTTPS), an optional Basic auth credential, a pinned API version for stability, a list of subscribed event types, and message-payload controls for max size and max events per delivery. You can scope a webhook tightly to a single event for clean separation of concerns, or subscribe one endpoint to a whole event family when your handler branches internally. An expansion list gives you fine-grained control over which parts of an object come along in the payload, so a shipment webhook can receive only the shipping block instead of the entire order record.

Event coverage spans the full commerce lifecycle. Order events include create, update, delete, stage change, payment processed, payment failed, ship, ship expected, out for delivery, delivered, reject, refund, and S3 invoice archival. Beyond orders, webhooks fire on auto-order (subscription) activity, chargebacks, checkout events, customer record changes, item create/update/delete, and distribution-center fulfillment transmissions. The WordPress plugin is a real example: on first authorization it creates a webhook subscribed to item_create, item_update, and item_delete, then triggers a one-time reflow so all existing items resend through the same pipeline, and from that point forward no polling is required.

Operationally, UltraCart webhooks ship with the tooling real developers expect. A built-in Test button sends a sample payload to verify your endpoint is wired up correctly. Every delivery is logged with status, response code, and body so debugging does not require reinventing an inspection layer. Basic authentication is supported out of the box, API versioning keeps mission-critical integrations stable through platform updates, and fulfillment webhooks can be routed through a distribution center’s REST transmission mechanism so warehouse systems receive orders on the same cadence they already operate on. For a step-by-step walkthrough including PHP and Python script examples, see the Creating a Simple Webhook guide and the Webhooks API reference.