Designing webhooks people can rely on
Idempotency keys, signature versioning, retry ladders and replay — the four things that separate usable webhooks from a support burden.
Ship an idempotency key and say plainly in the docs that consumers must deduplicate on it. Delivery is at-least-once; anyone promising exactly-once over HTTP is mistaken or selling something.
Version the signature from the first release. A `v1,` prefix costs nothing today and is the only thing that lets you rotate schemes later without breaking every consumer at once.
Back off rather than hammer: one minute, five, thirty, two hours, then dead-letter. And ship a replayable event log — every consumer eventually needs to backfill a gap, and that should be self-serve at 2am rather than a support ticket.
Keep reading
What is commerce intelligence?
Commerce intelligence is the layer above price monitoring: an index of what exists, who sells it, at what, and what that means.
Why percentile beats percent-off
A percentile against a product's own history is a defensible measure of discount depth; percent-off a reference price is not.
Product matching and why it fails quietly
How cross-seller product matching works, the three ways it fails, and why published match confidence matters.
GTIN, UPC, EAN and ASIN
How product identifiers relate, why check digits matter, and what to do when there is no identifier at all.
Data provenance in commerce data
Why every price should carry its origin and a confidence weight, and what goes wrong when it does not.