Shopify could save MILLIONS $$ per month with 1 change!

[jason_engage]

Please pass this info up to someone in the leadership that can comprehend!:

When you send “x/updated” webhooks out, add an extra field that contains a “list” of the UPDATED FIELDS. Since we do not know which fields are updated, we must make 1 or more (in my case many more) api calls to simply DO NOTHING IN 95% OF CASES.

If you told me which fields were updated, i could reduce my own API usage by over 80% per DAY. My apps probably make 1 million api calls per day.

Multiply that by all the apps, and Shopify can reduce API CALLS by billions, per day. We partners could reduce our own expenses on servers and bandwidth. Think of all the wasted resources.

Without knowing which exact fields were updated, we are working BLIND and DUMB.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[KyleG-Shopify]

Hey @jason_engage, have you looked in to using filters? The reason I ask is you can use these to only receive webhooks on the changes that are important to your app.

Filter your events

[jason_engage]

Interesting. This is another buried doc that I would bet most people have no idea exists.

Ok so can it tell me if the product images have changed, or in this case only if product images have changed? Can i stack the filter with OR ie. if product images have changed OR product title has changed?

[KyleG-Shopify]

You have me doing my homework today Jason!

Turns out it’s not as simple as I alluded to. With the filters it’s more similar to api query filters; where you need to specify a specific value or criteria. Like in the example provided where it will only send the webhook on products that have a price greater than 10

“variants.price:>=10.00”

You can still use that to limit what you receive (ie products with no images don’t get sent, or ignore products that aren’t published to the online store, etc)

You can also limit the data your app needs to parse by using only the include fields that are relevant.

As for specific sending on changes to predetermined fields, that’s still in the works

[Feature Request] Webhook filtering on field changes

Thanks for the feedback on filters! The ability to filter a webhook based on field changes makes perfect sense. This is something the team is already aware of and will be considered in the future.

[jason_engage]

Thanks for the follow-up, i added my 2-cents in this thread, which is line with what I’m saying:

[Feature Request] Webhook filtering on field changes

Current webhook filtering solution is limited, difficult to setup, and does not include all types of cases, and all operators. A better solution - would be to add an additional field to ALL webhooks that simply tells us which fields have CHANGED. I don’t care if the value has gone up or down. I just want to know if its different. I suspect most use cases for this idea would fall into this category. If you tell me what has CHANGED, i can reduce my API usage by 1 million calls per day, no problem…

I just don’t think this webhook filtering solution is the right approach to deal with the insane load of webhooks coming from products/update. I don’t just care about 1 or 2 fields. theres alot of fileds i care about, but not all of them either.

[KyleG-Shopify]

Thanks for sharing that there. It’s a solid and fair request.