Common Webhook Events in Business Apps

A webhook fires on an event, and each app decides which events it offers. The apps below publish their lists, and the names tell you what's covered. Read the maker's own list before you plan a setup.

Events are named like labels

Apps usually give each event a short name, often in the form "thing, then action." Shopify calls these topics. Its documentation says you can use webhook subscriptions to receive notifications about particular events in a shop¹.

Stripe and GitHub use the term event. The idea is the same.

Orders and sales

Shopify's topic list includes these names¹:

Source: Shopify developer documentation, checked 2026-11-14. The right-hand column is our reading of each name, not Shopify's wording, so confirm what each one covers in Shopify's own documentation¹.

Wikipedia lists a purchase and a comment being posted to a blog among the events that can trigger a webhook².

Payments and billing

Stripe says receiving webhook events helps you respond to asynchronous events, such as when a customer disputes a charge or a recurring payment succeeds³. Asynchronous means the event happens later, on its own timing, outside your own request.

A single action can produce several events. Stripe notes that creating a subscription might generate the following events: customer.subscription.created, invoice.created, invoice.paid and, if there's a charge, charge.created³.

That's useful to know. If you only need to record a paid invoice, you want invoice.paid and nothing else.

Code and team activity

GitHub offers events for code pushed to a repository, a pull request opened, a site built, or a new member added to a team⁴. Small teams that don't write software can skip this group, but it shows how broad the idea is.

Choosing which events to subscribe to

1. Write down the job. For example, "add a row to a sheet whenever an order is paid."
2. Find the event in the maker's list that matches the job.
3. Subscribe to that event only.
4. Test with one real or sample event before you rely on it.

Stripe recommends configuring webhook endpoints to receive only the types of events required by your integration³. Its page adds that listening for extra events, or all events, puts undue strain on your server.

Reading event names carefully

Similar names can mean different things. A "created" event and a "paid" event for the same order are separate events. An order might be created and not paid yet.

Don't assume an event exists because a similar one does. Check the list. If the event you want isn't there, the app may not offer it, and checking its API on a schedule may be the only option. See Webhook or API Polling.

The request itself is broken down in What Is Inside a Webhook Request.