What is Shopify?

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform: a ready-made service for building and running an online store. It handles the storefront, product catalogue, shopping cart, checkout, payments, and order management, so a merchant can start selling without building or hosting any of that themselves.

What it’s used for

• Selling online: a storefront with product pages, collections, and a secure checkout.
• Taking payments: Shopify Payments, plus many third-party gateways.
• Managing orders: orders, customers, inventory, shipping, and refunds in one admin.
• Extending the store: themes for the look, and apps for extra features such as reviews, email marketing, or accounting.

Getting data out: webhooks and the Admin API

Shopify’s admin shows orders, but sometimes you need the data somewhere else — a profit report, an ERP, a warehouse tool. It offers two ways to get it:

• Webhooks: Shopify pushes an event to your server the moment something happens, such as orders/create. Each request is signed with HMAC so you can verify it really came from Shopify.
• Admin API: you pull what you need on demand (REST and GraphQL) — useful for importing past orders and for catching anything a webhook missed.

A reliable integration typically uses both: webhooks for real-time updates, the API as a safety net. Not every piece of data has a webhook, though — payment-processing fees, for example, have to be looked up through the API once the charge settles.

When to reach for Shopify

• You want to sell products online without running your own store software
• You’d rather pay a subscription than maintain hosting, checkout, and payment security yourself
• You still want room to customise through themes, apps, and the API

It’s less of a fit when you need a fully custom checkout or business logic that a hosted platform won’t allow — a self-hosted store (for example OpenCart or a custom build) gives more control at the cost of more maintenance.

Further reading

Official docs: shopify.dev/docs