A webhook is a message one system sends to another when something happens, so the second system does not have to keep asking whether it has.
Oct 5, 2026
The alternative is polling: asking every few minutes whether anything has changed. That is wasteful when nothing has and slow when something has, and it scales badly once several systems are all asking the same question of the same place.
A webhook inverts it. The ordering platform calls your endpoint the moment an order is confirmed, carrying the detail with it, so the ERP, the warehouse, or the notification sits on the event rather than hunting for it.
Delivery is never guaranteed, so the receiving end has to tolerate the same event arriving twice, and the occasional one arriving late or not at all. Treating each message as a nudge to go and read the authoritative record is more robust than treating the message as the record.
The common failure is a silent one. An endpoint that starts returning errors stops the flow without anyone noticing, until a week of orders has not reached the warehouse. Webhook delivery is worth monitoring as explicitly as the orders themselves.
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