Shopify vs Stripe webhooks for event handling

Here’s the practical difference:

Short version

• Stripe webhooks are best for payment/subscription events that happen in Stripe’s billing system.
• Shopify webhooks are best for store commerce events like orders, products, customers, inventory, fulfillment, etc.
• If you’re building a system around payments only, use Stripe webhooks.
• If you’re building around a Shopify store, use Shopify webhooks.
• If you use both Shopify and Stripe, you may need both, depending on which system is the source of truth for each event.

Main differences

1) What events they cover

Stripe

• payment_intent.succeeded
• charge.refunded
• invoice.paid
• customer.subscription.updated
• payment_method.attached

Shopify

• orders/create
• orders/paid
• products/update
• customers/create
• inventory_levels/update
• fulfillments/create

2) Typical use cases

Stripe webhooks

• Confirm payment after asynchronous processing
• Update subscription status
• Handle refunds/chargebacks
• Provision access after payment succeeds

Shopify webhooks

• Sync orders into your ERP/CRM
• Trigger fulfillment workflows
• Update product catalogs
• Track inventory changes
• React to customer/order changes in the store

3) Reliability / event model

Both are webhook-based push systems, so similar core concerns apply:

• Retry delivery
• Verify signatures
• Make handlers idempotent
• Return 2xx quickly
• Process asynchronously when possible

4) Source of truth

This is usually the biggest architectural difference:

• With Stripe, Stripe is the source of truth for billing/payment state
• With Shopify, Shopify is the source of truth for store/order state

If you need to know “did the customer pay?”, Stripe is usually the authority.
If you need to know “did an order get placed in the store?”, Shopify is the authority.

Which should you choose?

Choose Stripe webhooks if:

• You’re building SaaS billing
• You need subscriptions, invoices, payment confirmations
• You’re not tied to a Shopify storefront

Choose Shopify webhooks if:

• You run an ecommerce backend for a Shopify store
• You need order and catalog sync
• You care about fulfillment/inventory/customer updates

Use both if:

• You accept payment through Stripe but also sell via Shopify
• Shopify triggers the order, but Stripe handles billing for another part of your system
• You need end-to-end order/payment orchestration across both platforms

Important implementation notes for both

• Verify webhook signatures
• Deduplicate events using event IDs
• Store processed events
• Make processing idempotent
• Don’t do heavy work in the webhook request
• Handle retries gracefully

Simple rule of thumb

• Stripe = money
• Shopify = commerce operations

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a feature-by-feature comparison table, or
2. a recommended architecture for using both together.