Webhooks Explained: How Your Business Tools Can Talk to Each Other in Real Time

If you’ve been looking into connecting your business tools, you’ve probably come across the word “webhook.” Maybe a developer mentioned it. Maybe it appeared in a Zapier setup screen. Maybe a software vendor listed it as a feature and you had no idea what it meant.

Webhooks aren’t complicated. But understanding what they do — and when they matter — helps you make better decisions about how your business systems connect. Here’s the non-technical version.

What Is a Webhook?

A webhook is a notification from one system to another. When something happens — a new order, a payment received, a form submitted — the system where the event occurred sends a message to another system, saying “hey, this just happened, here’s the details.”

Think of it like a doorbell. Instead of repeatedly walking to the front door to check whether anyone’s there (that’s polling — more on that in a moment), you install a doorbell so visitors announce themselves the moment they arrive.

In practical terms: when a customer pays an invoice in Xero, Xero can send a webhook to your CRM saying “Invoice #1234 was just paid, here’s the amount and date.” Your CRM receives that message and updates the customer record instantly. No delay, no checking, no manual intervention.

Webhooks vs. Polling: Why It Matters

Before webhooks became common, the only way to keep systems in sync was polling. Polling means one system repeatedly asks another: “Has anything changed? How about now? Now?” — over and over, at a set interval.

Both approaches achieve the same outcome — data moves from one system to another. But the differences matter for your business.

Polling

Your integration checks the other system every 5 minutes (or 15, or 60) to see if anything has changed. If nothing’s changed, the check was wasted. If something changed 4 minutes and 59 seconds ago, you’re only just finding out.

The problems:

• Delay. Data is only as fresh as your polling interval. A 15-minute poll means up to 15 minutes of lag.
• Wasted resources. Most checks find nothing new. You’re burning API calls (and often paying for them) just to hear “nope, nothing’s changed.”
• Rate limits. Every software API has limits on how many requests you can make per hour. Frequent polling eats into those limits, leaving less room for actual data operations.

Webhooks

The source system sends a notification the instant something happens. No checking, no interval, no wasted calls.

The advantages:

• Instant. Your systems know about changes within seconds, not minutes or hours.
• Efficient. No wasted API calls. You only receive messages when something actually happens.
• Scalable. Whether you process 10 events per day or 10,000, webhooks handle both without increasing your API usage.

When Webhooks Matter Most

Not every integration needs real-time data. If you’re syncing a customer list overnight for a monthly report, a scheduled batch sync is perfectly fine. But there are scenarios where the speed difference between polling and webhooks has real business impact.

Payment notifications. When a customer pays an invoice, your team needs to know immediately — to release a product, start a job, or update a project status. A 15-minute polling delay means your customer is waiting while your system hasn’t caught up.

Order processing. E-commerce orders need to flow to your fulfilment system fast. Every minute of delay is a minute added to your dispatch time. Webhooks mean the order hits your system the moment the customer completes checkout.

Stock level updates. When inventory changes in your warehouse system, your online store needs to reflect it. Polling every 15 minutes means you could oversell a product that’s been out of stock for 14 minutes. Webhooks keep stock levels accurate in near real-time.

Customer communications. Automated emails or SMS triggered by events (appointment confirmations, dispatch notifications, payment receipts) need to go out promptly. Nobody wants an appointment confirmation arriving 30 minutes after they booked.

The Reliability Problem

Here’s the thing about webhooks that nobody talks about until it bites them: they’re not guaranteed to arrive.

A webhook is essentially one system making a single attempt to send a message to another system. If the receiving system is down, busy, or returns an error, that message can be lost. Unlike polling — where the next check will pick up the missed change — a lost webhook is gone unless someone handles the failure.

This is why reliability matters more than most businesses realise.

What Can Go Wrong

• Your receiving system is temporarily down. Server maintenance, a brief outage, or a deployment. The webhook arrives, nobody’s home, the message is lost.
• Network issues. Internet hiccups, DNS problems, timeouts. The webhook was sent but never arrived.
• Processing errors. Your system receives the webhook but fails to process it — maybe the data format was unexpected, maybe a database insert failed.
• Duplicate deliveries. Some systems send the same webhook twice (as a safety measure). If your integration isn’t designed to handle duplicates, you get double entries.

How to Handle It

Retry logic. Well-designed webhook systems retry failed deliveries. Stripe, for example, retries failed webhooks up to 20 times over several days with increasing intervals. Not every platform is this thorough — check what your tools actually do.

Idempotency. Your receiving system should handle the same webhook arriving twice without creating duplicate records. This usually means checking whether the event has already been processed before acting on it.

Fallback polling. The belt-and-braces approach: use webhooks for speed, but run a periodic poll as a safety net to catch anything the webhooks missed. This is more work to build but gives you the best of both worlds.

Monitoring and alerts. Know when webhooks fail. A simple dashboard or alert that flags missed events lets you catch problems before they compound. If your Xero payment webhooks stopped arriving two days ago and nobody noticed, you’ve got two days of unsynced payment data to reconcile manually.

Webhooks in Common Business Tools

Here’s how webhook support looks across popular Australian business tools:

Strong webhook support: Stripe, Shopify, Xero, HubSpot, Slack, GitHub, Twilio. These platforms have mature webhook systems with retry logic, delivery logs, and good documentation.

Basic webhook support: QuickBooks Online, MYOB, Pipedrive, WooCommerce. Webhooks are available but may have limitations — fewer event types, less robust retry logic, or limited delivery logging.

No or limited webhooks: Many industry-specific tools, older platforms, and some smaller SaaS products still rely on polling. If a tool you rely on doesn’t support webhooks, your integration will need to poll — which works, but adds cost and latency.

Making the Decision

You don’t need to become a webhook expert. But when you’re evaluating integration tools or discussing a project with a developer, knowing the basics helps you ask the right questions:

• Does the source system support webhooks for the events I care about? If yes, use them. If no, polling is fine — just budget for the delay and API costs.
• What happens when a webhook fails? Look for retry logic and delivery logs. If the platform doesn’t retry, your integration needs its own safety net.
• Is near-instant data important for this workflow? Payment processing and order fulfilment — yes. Monthly reporting sync — probably not.
• What’s the volume? At low volumes, polling and webhooks cost about the same. At high volumes, webhooks are dramatically cheaper and more efficient.

The best integrations use webhooks where speed matters and polling where it doesn’t — with proper error handling on both. It’s not about choosing one or the other. It’s about using each where it makes sense and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.