A users interaction on a website and in particular eCommerce website can be described as a series of events. Webhooks are a way of responding to these events.

A users interaction on a website and in particular eCommerce website can be described as a series of events. Whenever a user does something like sign in, register, request a password reset link, add an item to their basket etc. an event occurs. Webhooks are a way of responding to these events.

Age verification

With age verification becoming increasingly more regulated, it is important to make sure your website, if it sells age restricted products, is designed to check a customer is over 18. This can be achieved with webhooks and the T2A method age_verification. Most eCommerce solutions (e.g. WooCommerce) will provide webhooks that you can use. For WooCommerce you could set your Topic as “Customer created”, “Order created”, “Order updated” and then run the T2A age verification to check the customer information against our extensive UK people data sources to see if the user is over 18. Alternatively, you could select Action as your topic field and create a webhook that fires after a particular WooCommerce action occurs e.g. “woocommerce_after_checkout_validation”.

Identity Verification

Another use for webhooks is to check customer information to prevent fraudulent card transactions. Stripe, Braintree and other merchant account providers will provide webhook interaction which you can use by checking customer input against our person_verify method. This could be a first step in flagging a transaction that needs further investigation. Our person_verify method checks a name and address against our 48+ million data set of UK people and indicates whether they exist in our data.

Contact Appending

As well as verification you could use webhooks and T2A to improve your customer database.
We have substantial information on UK people and businesses. Using a “Customer created” webhook you could use our person_search method to enhance the customer record. The person_search method returns telephone numbers, mobile numbers and links the person to associated companies if they are a company director. Alternatively, if you are dealing with a UK business you could get further information on the company using our business_search, company_details, company_credit_report and director_details methods. Our business data includes telephone numbers, company website, company appointments, credit reports and information on directors. This appended customer information could help with marketing, profiling, order fulfillment and other customer service requirements.

Alternatively, if you don't need to update customer records on the fly during webhooks you can take advantage of the bulk telephone number appending API method.

TPS Checking

The last use case in this post is the tps_full method. Again using a “Customer created” webhook you could check if the customers telephone number is on the TPS or Corporate TPS register and flag the record accordingly. You could also periodically check all your records with the bulk tps checking method tps_bulk (though this would not be during a webhook).