Have you ever thought that it would be great if I could connect Ticketsolve to another app? Well, you can actually do that using our webhook integration. In simplistic terms, a webhook will allow you to send data from Ticketsolve into another app.
In this article, we’ll cover all things webhooks; what they are, how they work, suggestions on how to use them and a couple of simple examples. We have other articles as part of this topic that will go into much more detail if you want to get started and get set up with webhooks.
Webhook introduction
You may have heard of webhooks or seen a webhook setting in one of your other apps and wondered if they're something you should be using within your organisations. The answer to that question is, yes, you really should be looking at how you can utilise webhooks.
Webhooks are one way that apps can send automated messages or information to other apps. It’s a simple way your Ticketsolve account can "speak" to another app automatically when something new happens. In the context of Ticketsolve, you can send over customers and purchase data to another app after an order has been completed.
Let's break webhooks down a little more and learn how to speak webhook and get to know all the lingo.
What is a Webhook?
When apps connect to each other there are two main ways in which they communicate; polling and webhooks. Zapier, the best automated platform out there (and a system we will be talking about more whenever we talk about webhooks) have a really good way of remembering how the communication methods work:
“Polling is like knocking on your friend’s door and asking if they have any sugar (aka information), but you have to go and ask for it every time you want it. Webhooks are like someone tossing a bag of sugar at your house whenever they buy some. You don't have to ask, they just automatically punt it over every time it's available.”
So, webhooks is basically an automated message sent from an app (like Ticketsolve) when something happens (like when an order has been completed). The message will have data in it and that data will be sent to a catch URL - essentially the other app's phone number or address (in the Zapier sugar example). Webhooks are almost always faster than polling and they require far less work from your end, which is a win win.
A good explanation of how a webhook works is to think of an SMS message. Say for example your bank sends a SMS when you make a new purchase with your card. You have told the bank your phone number (the catch URL) and the bank will notify you automatically every time you make a purchase.
- You make a purchase with your card
- The bank gets that data from your account
- They have your phone number
- They send an SMS to you summarising what you purchased
And that is a very simple example of how a webhook can work. We've also created a little infographic below to help illustrate the whole process.
Wait, that’s great but how does that relate to me? Ok, let’s give a little more Ticketsolve context and show an example of what you could do with webhooks.
Ticketsolve example
The Ticketsolve Theatre does a lot of fundraising but we are only a small team and don’t have enough resources to keep logging into Ticketsolve to find out who our big donors are, or if our big donors are buying tickets. Well, if we utilise webhooks, we can let technology do the heavy lifting for us.
We could set up a webhook that connects Ticketsolve to our email client and send an email to the fundraising team each time a customer leaves a donation of over £50. In that email, the message will also include the customer's name, their details, how much they donated and the order number.
We could also set up an email notification each time one of our top donors purchase a ticket to a show. We would basically tag all their top donors in the Ticketsolve system, and then set up a webhook when customers with that tag buys a tickets. In the email, the body information can include the customer's name, their details, what show they purchased for, how many tickets they have purchase etc…
As you can see, there are hundreds of possibilities when it comes to using webhooks. Now that you know what webhooks are, we suggest taking a look at all the other articles within this section and start using webhooks.
What can Ticketsolve Webhooks not do?
Webhooks are not meant to be a bidirectional sync of data. This means that although you can connect Ticketsolve to other platforms, you cannot pass data back to Ticketsolve. Think of a webhook as a river that flows in one direction — information will flow from Ticketsolve into the designated systems or applications that you have connected to but cannot flow the other way.
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