How to listen for subscription orders being placed

Hello, I am the developer of an app that adds appropriate taxes to the cart for a customers cart based off the products in it. The problem I am running into is I have a client that has another Shopify app that allows customers to subscribe and save on a product where it gets reordered to them each month. It seems that these reorders are not triggering the orders/create webhook, so I cannot notify my client they need to have taxes on that order, let alone actually add the correct taxes to the cart on each subscription. I cannot test with the subscriptions API because it seems to not be allowed on test stores. I was wondering the best way to listen for the subscription recurring orders via the Shopify API, to at least be notified of each one when they happen and if at all possible be able to actually modify the order to add the tax product to the cart?

Hi @c_tot

Good question.

Did you know there are separate webhooks specifically around Subscription Contract events?

Perhaps you can use the Subscription Contract API to modify the billing details of the subscription before the charge is processed?

I can confirm that orders/create webhook is triggered for orders generated by subscription apps. If you’re not seeing them its likely because they’re not being created or possibly bc you have a filter on your webhook subscription.

And you can test subscriptions on test stores with bogus gateway. There may be some apps that don’t support this but the majority should.

Hey Brian, thanks for the reply that is helpful. In terms of orders/create is there a special order.source_name I need to be looking out for as that is really the only thing I am filtering on. Is it possible that different subscription apps can come through different channels or something, which can cause them to not trigger orders/create ? Also for the second point, I tried a couple subscription apps and they all did not allow the bogus gateway, but I suppose Ill go try some more of them, I just figured that they all wanted testing to be done via a real payment gateway in test mode. Thanks for the knowledge

order.source_name will certainly change when the source is the subscription app vs the online store. Remove the filter and run your tests again.

I’m surprised to hear that the first two apps you found don’t support bogus gateway. That’s fairly transparent too apps. I’m guessing that you’re doing something else that’s causing you’re issues. You’re welcome to test with our app, Awtomic. I test it on a regular basis with the bogus gateway