Do I need inbound webhooks to integrate with Stripe or Shopify?

Not always.

Short answer

• Stripe: You usually don’t need inbound webhooks to start integrating, but you should use them if you need to react reliably to events that happen after your API call (e.g. payment succeeded, dispute opened, subscription canceled).
• Shopify: If you’re building a Shopify app or need to stay in sync with store events, you’ll typically need webhooks. For simple one-off API reads/writes, not necessarily.

What “inbound webhooks” are for

Inbound webhooks mean the platform calls your server when something happens. This is different from your app calling their API.

They’re useful when:

• an event happens asynchronously
• you need reliability even if your app misses a response
• you want to avoid polling

Stripe

You can often integrate Stripe with just API requests for:

• creating customers
• creating payment intents / checkout sessions
• reading payment status immediately after redirect or API call

But webhooks are important for:

• payment_intent.succeeded
• checkout.session.completed
• invoice.paid
• customer.subscription.updated
• charge.dispute.created

Why? Because payment flows can complete later, and the client/browser may not be enough to trust as the source of truth.

Shopify

For Shopify, it depends on what you’re building:

• Simple admin app tasks: maybe no webhooks needed
• Order/inventory/customer sync: webhooks are usually the right approach
• OAuth and install/uninstall lifecycle: webhooks are commonly required or strongly recommended
• App Store/public apps: webhooks are often part of the expected architecture

Rule of thumb

• If you only need to send requests and get immediate responses, you may not need inbound webhooks.
• If you need to know when something changes later, webhooks are the better pattern.

If you want, I can tell you specifically for your use case whether you need webhooks for Stripe, Shopify, or both.