Flow Trigger ExtensionsFlow Trigger Extensions

How triggers work

Understanding which of the three mechanisms a trigger uses explains almost every question about timing, setup, and why something did or did not fire.

The three mechanisms

Mechanism Triggers Latency Needs a baseline
Shopify webhook 25 Near real time No
Webhook + change detection 51 Near real time Yes
Polling 6 Up to one poll interval Yes

1. Shopify webhook

Shopify notifies the app the moment the event happens, and the app forwards it straight to Shopify Flow. Discount Created and Location Deleted work this way.

These triggers need no setup beyond the permission. They are on by default and you suppress the ones you do not want.

2. Webhook plus change detection

This is the largest group, and it is what makes the app useful. Shopify's products/update webhook fires for any product edit and does not say what changed. So the app:

  1. stores a snapshot of the fields you care about,
  2. compares each incoming webhook against that snapshot, and
  3. fires the specific trigger only when that specific field actually changed.

That is how Product Title Changed can fire on a title edit and stay silent on a price edit, even though both arrive as the same Shopify webhook.

3. Polling

Shopify publishes no webhooks for blogs, blog posts, pages, order display status, discount expiry, or company-location tax settings. For these 6 triggers the app checks on a schedule and fires when it sees a difference.

Polling triggers are switched on from Settings > Polling Triggers. They cost one poll cycle of latency rather than firing instantly.

What arrives in your workflow

Field-level triggers deliver the old and the new value, so you can branch on the change itself without a follow-up lookup:

yaml
Old price: 19.99
New price: 24.99
SKU:       WIDGET-BLUE-M

List-shaped changes are delivered as structured objects rather than comma-separated text, so you can iterate and branch on them in Flow. Order line item changes, publication changes, and company-location tax exemptions all work this way.

Ordering and duplicates

  • Events are deduplicated on Shopify's event id, so a redelivery does not fire your workflow twice.
  • The app applies a short per-store rate limit so a bulk edit of thousands of products does not overwhelm your workflows. Events are queued, not dropped.
  • A bulk operation that changes 5,000 products produces 5,000 events and consumes 5,000 of your monthly quota. See Plans and usage.