Best Practices: Create Webhooks in Your Core Product

Webhooks in your core app allow you to simplify export integrations. Setting up webhooks may add quite a bit of development time to the first export integration, but subsequent integrations can be completed much faster because of the webhooks. And, speaking of faster, webhooks help your export work in near-real-time.

Webhooks are also not limited in terms of endpoints, so they can be used to export data to multiple destinations. For example, if you have a webhook that triggers whenever there is an update in your inventory system, and it fires off a payload that includes updated inventory data (even if some of that data is extraneous to the current integration), you can easily filter that data within the integration to what is needed by the destination system. Then, when you are creating the next integration for inventory updates, you already have the payload with everything in it (which you can now filter for a different dataset for your second integration).

Once you have webhooks set up for your core app, you shouldn't need nearly as much help from devs to build out additional export integrations. In fact, your technical non-developers should be able to build export integrations that follow the same pattern as existing integrations. This frees your devs to work on the core product rather than the integrations.