fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) and Webhooks

When we released fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) last week there was one feature that we wanted to include that wasn’t quite ready: Order Webhooks. The initial release of fmEcommerce Link lets you download orders from WooCommerce, either all at once or within a specified date range. For many users that will be sufficient as they might only need to download all orders from the previous day.

Some customers would prefer to be notified immediately the order was placed and have it automatically download into FileMaker – you could setup a server side schedule that ran every x minutes that checked for new orders since a specified timestamp, but it’s much more efficient to leverage Webhooks if they are available. A Webhook is simply a way of having WooCommerce send a notification to another service at a nominated URL when a particular event is triggered.

Webhooks were introduced in WooCommerce 2.2 and can trigger events each time you add, edit or delete orders, products, coupons or customers. New orders seemed the logical place to start – wouldn’t it be great if upon receiving a new order in WooCommerce it could be pushed to the fmAccounting Link FileMaker file automatically without you having to do anything?

We’ll be releasing a free update to fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) in the next couple of days which will include support for Webhooks when a new Order is created. You will need to setup a Webhook and install the supplied PHP file on your FileMaker Server (you will need to enable Custom Web Publishing/PHP in your FileMaker Server Admin Console), and once this in place anytime a new Order is received in WooCommerce it will automatically be pushed to the fmEcommerce Link file, typically within a few seconds.

This was a feature that we wanted for ourselves to completely streamline the order entry process for our business – there’s nothing better than waking up in the morning and seeing new overnight orders already in the fmEcommerce Link file. Here’s a short video demonstrating this in action (you can also watch this on YouTube here):