Webhooks

ShipBob webhooks automatically notify your app when key events occur, allowing you to keep your data in sync.

Getting Started

Key Concepts

• Subscription: A request to receive webhook notifications at a specified URL.
• Subscription URL: The endpoint where webhook data is sent.
• Event: A trigger that generates webhook data (e.g., an order being shipped).
• Topic: The category of event data being sent.
• Payload: The actual event data sent in the webhook.
• Response: A 2XX HTTP response is required to confirm webhook receipt.

Common Use Cases

• ✅ Real-time Order Tracking - Receive order.shipped and order.shipment.delivered events to provide live tracking updates to customers.
• ✅ Inventory Management - Monitor order.shipment.exception events to detect and respond to stock shortages.
• ✅ Return completed notifications - Use return.completed events to update your system when a return has successfully been processed and completed by ShipBob.

Webhook Topics & Events

Webhook Headers

ShipBob sends webhook notifications with the following headers:

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{
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  "x-webhook-topic": "order.shipment.on_hold",
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  "webhook-timestamp": "1755884852",
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  "webhook-signature": "v1,5BO0uMAu1XYGkAJOpZb0Piel11YaChVEZCpXY6mwUMA",
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  "webhook-id": "msg_31eW7bWRi16lL0Ajjik68kfyeUh",
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  "content-type": "application/json"
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}

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{
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  "shipbob-subscription-id": "1582",
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  "shipbob-topic": "order_shipped",
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  "content-type": "application/json"
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}

Verifying Signatures

Each webhook call includes three headers used for verification:

• webhook-id: The unique message identifier for the webhook message. This identifier is unique across all messages, but will be the same when the same webhook is being resent (e.g. due to a previous failure)
• webhook-timestamp: Unix timestamp in seconds (seconds since epoch).
• webhook-signature: A space-delimited list of signatures, where each signature value is base64-encoded and may include a version prefix.

Constructing the signed content

The content to sign is composed by concatenating the id, timestamp and payload, separated by the full-stop character (.). In code, it will look something like:

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const signedContent = `${webhook_id}.${webhook_timestamp}.${body}`;

Where body is the raw request body. The signature is sensitive to any changes, so even a small change in the body will cause the signature to be completely different. This means that you should not change the body in any way before verifying.

Determining the expected signature

ShipBob uses HMAC with SHA-256 to sign the webhooks.

To calculate the expected signature, you should HMAC the signed_content from above using the base64-decoded bytes of your signing secret as the key. Specifically, take the portion after the whsec_ prefix, base64-decode it, and use the decoded bytes as the HMAC key. For example, given the secret whsec_MfKQ9r8GKYqrTwjUPD8ILPZIo2LaLaSw, you would base64-decode MfKQ9r8GKYqrTwjUPD8ILPZIo2LaLaSw and use the resulting bytes as the key.

For example, this is how you can decode the secret and calculate the signature in Node.js:

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const crypto = require('crypto');
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const signedContent = `${webhook_id}.${webhook_timestamp}.${body}`;
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const secret = "whsec_5WbX5kEWLlfzsGNjH64I8lOOqUB6e8FH";
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// Take the portion after `whsec_`, base64-decode it, and use the resulting bytes as the HMAC key.
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const decodedSecret = Buffer.from(secret.split('_')[1], "base64");
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const signature = crypto
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  .createHmac('sha256', decodedSecret)
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  .update(signedContent)
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  .digest('base64');
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console.log(signature);

This generated signature should match one of the signatures sent in the webhook-signature header.

Understanding the webhook-signature header

The webhook-signature header is composed of a list of space-delimited signatures and their corresponding version identifiers. The signature list is most commonly of length one, though there could be any number of signatures. For example:

v1,g0hM9SsE+OTPJTGt/tmIKtSyZlE3uFJELVlNIOLJ1OE=

Webhook Payloads

✨ The best way to see examples of webhook payloads is to create a webhook in the ShipBob Dashboard by going to:
Integrations → Webhooks → Create new subscription.

1. Add your subscription URL — this is the endpoint on your server where ShipBob will send the webhook data.
2. Select a topic — choose an event type such as order.shipped or return.completed.
3. Click “Send example” — ShipBob will immediately send a sample JSON payload to your URL so you can preview the structure.

This approach makes it easy to test your integration, validate your endpoint, and understand the exact payload format without waiting for a real event to occur.

Retry Schedule

Each message is attempted based on the following schedule, where each period is started following the failure of the preceding attempt: 

• Immediately 
• 5 seconds 
• 5 minutes 
• 30 minutes 
• 2 hours 
• 5 hours 
• 10 hours 
• 10 hours (in addition to the previous) 

If an endpoint is removed or disabled delivery attempts to the endpoint will be disabled as well. 

For example, an attempt that fails three times before eventually succeeding will be delivered roughly 35 minutes and 5 seconds following the first attempt. 

Indicating successful delivery 

The way to indicate that a webhook has been processed is by returning a 2xx (status code 200-299) response to the webhook message within a reasonable time-frame (15s). Any other status code, including 3xx redirects are treated as failures. 

Failed delivery handling 

After the conclusion of the above attempts the message will be marked as Failed for this endpoint, and the webhook sender’s account will get email notification for notifying them of this error. 

Manual retries 

You can also use the application portal to manually retry each message at any time, or automatically retry (“Recover”) all failed messages starting from a given date.

Disabling failing endpoints

If all attempts to a specific endpoint fail for a period of 5 days, the endpoint will be disabled and an email will be sent to the account owner. The clock only starts after multiple deliveries fail within a 24-hour span, with at least 12 hours difference between the first and the last failure.

Static Source IP Addresses

In case your webhook receiving endpoint is behind a firewall or NAT, you may need to allow traffic from static IP addresses.

This is the full list of IP addresses that webhooks may originate from.

44.228.126.217
50.112.21.217
52.24.126.164
54.148.139.208
2600:1f24:64:8000::/56

Best Practices

✅ Use HTTPS - Subscription URLs must support SSL. Use RequestBin for testing if needed.

✅ Implement Redundancy - Webhooks may be delayed or lost. Use GET endpoints to periodically reconcile data.

✅ Retry Handling - Events may arrive out of order due to retries—handle them as independent updates.

✅ Use Idempotency - Store webhook event ids and discard duplicates to prevent redundant processing.

✅ Logging & Monitoring - Log webhook requests and responses to diagnose issues.

Troubleshooting Guide