Webhooks Just Got Smarter With Platform Data

Webhooks Just Got More Powerful

Building event-driven systems should be elegant. When a customer creates an order, updates an invoice, or processes a payment, your webhook handler should have everything it needs to take action immediately. No follow-up API calls, no additional complexity, no waiting.

That's the vision we've been working toward at Rutter. We’re excited to continue making it a reality with our new feature, Platform Data.

The Problem: When Webhooks Aren't Enough

Let's say you're building an e-commerce FP&A tool. You’re using Rutter to connect to the dozens of e-commerce systems your customers require, with a minimum of custom logic.

To ensure the data in this tool is always up to date, you receive a webhook when a new order is created in Shopify. The webhook payload contains all the standardized fields from our universal API—customer info, line items, total amount, shipping details. Perfect, right?

Well, not quite. Your customers decide they have some highly specific needs that vary based on the platform they’re using. The benefit of universal APIs is their ability to fetch and standardize data from dozens of systems, but the tradeoff is that in order to keep a consistent model, not every single field from every single platform can be reflected in the model.

This is exactly what happened with one of our customers. They were processing order webhooks from Shopify, but needed access to platform-specific nuances on how discounts were applied to orders. As these fields are specific to Shopify, they aren’t part of Rutter’s universal API format, which captures data at a higher level to enforce consistency.

The traditional solution is to make a follow-up API call after every webhook to fetch the platform data. But this creates a cascade of problems:
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— Your event-driven architecture suddenly isn't event-driven anymore
— You're making additional API calls that count against rate limits
— Latency increases as you wait for that second request
— Your webhook handlers become more complex
— You have to build entirely new patterns for data fetching

For companies built around webhooks, this meant rearchitecting core parts of their integration just to access a single field.

The Solution: Platform Data, Delivered

Platform data in webhooks solves this elegantly. Instead of making you choose between clean webhook architecture and access to platform-specific fields, you get both. Here's how it works. You add JSONPath expressions through our Configuration API to specify exactly which platform fields you need on each webhook. When a webhook fires, it includes both the standardized data from our universal API and a filtered_platform_data field containing only the platform-specific fields you requested.

Your webhook handler processes everything in a single event. No follow-up calls, no additional complexity, no architectural compromises.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

At first glance, this might seem like a nice-to-have feature. But for companies building serious integrations, it's transformative.

Event-driven systems stay event-driven. Your webhook handlers can make decisions based on complete data without breaking the event-driven pattern that makes webhooks powerful in the first place.

Rate limits become less of a concern. When you're not making follow-up API calls after every webhook, you dramatically reduce your API usage. This is especially important for high-volume customers who were hitting limits by making GET requests after webhook events.

Latency drops significantly. Processing complete data in a single webhook is always faster than webhook + API call. For real-time applications, this difference matters.

Architecture stays clean. No more building separate data-fetching patterns or maintaining two different code paths for webhook vs. polling data access.

A Competitive Edge You Won't Find Elsewhere

When you choose Rutter, you're not just getting access to more platforms or better data quality (though you get both). You're getting infrastructure that's designed for how modern applications actually work: event-driven, real-time, and built for scale.

How to Get Started

Platform data in webhooks is available now across all platforms and webhook types. Current Rutter customers can head over to our Platform Data in Webhooks documentation for the details.

Not signed up with Rutter yet? Get a demo and we'll show you exactly how Rutter is tailor-made for your integration challenges.