hi! i’m using a shopify trigger node to detect product updates and creations like this.
Describe the issue/error/question
When i test the workflow, by listening to an event, going to shopify and updating/creating a product, it seems to be working great. However, we have left it running for +24 hours, and then have checked if the inventory was up-to date on our extracted google sheet and the shopify and it is not. It seems that there were some sales on shopify and the inventory on shopify went to 0, however this didn’t trigger the webhook, so in google sheet we didn’t receive this change.
Another anomlie, is that my shopify user edited some fields on the shopify and we haven’t received all updates, only like 70% of the updates…
Why do you think this is happening? is it posisble that the shopify node isn’t working properly? or is it more probable that there is a problem with my workflow ?
Hi @oly-dev, I am sorry for the trouble. The Shopify trigger nodes uses webhooks, but from quickly taking a peek at their own forum there don’t seem to be any logs: Shopify webhook Log - Shopify Community. So I don’t think we can say for certain what exactly has happened.
There would be warning emails if multiple webhooks fail as per Webhooks · Shopify Help Center, but I reckon you have not received those? In this case you might want to check with the Shopify support team what specifically happened as they do not provide webhook logs in their UI.
My best guess is that it could be a typical problem with distributed systems: If your sales come in around the same time, the order of webhooks arriving might not be the exact order in which the sales took place (or in other words, even though the inventory went down from 2 to 1 to 0, the webhooks might have arrived in an order like 2 to 0 to 1). I am not sure whether Shopify guarantees a specific order, but it might be worth looking through a number of executions that have occurred around the same time to check this.
Besides Shopify the problem could also be the use of Google Sheets. We had reports in the past about Google Sheets having trouble with multiple updates sent in quick succession.
The problem of various systems having trouble with providing exact counts has also been described by Tom Scott for example:
To avoid such a problem, you could consider pulling the inventory information in regular intervals (using the Schedule Trigger and the regular Shopify node) instead of relying on webhooks.
You could also consider using both, use the trigger node but also have a “backup workflow” running once a day and simply updating your existing data with whatever data it pulls in.
