Teachable offers basic plan owners and above access to their Teachable webhooks, but what are webhooks and how or why should you use them in your online course creation business model? We’ve also got an article about the new updated Teachable API.
What are webhooks?
First off, what are webhooks? Wikipedia, defines webhooks as “a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page or web application with custom callbacks.”
What this means is that when an action occurs on the Teachable side, Teachable can trigger an event or behavior that will do something someplace else. A good example of this would be when someone enrolls in a course, an event for that enrollment triggers an email to your new student and another email to you letting you know that someone just signed up. This happens internally, webhooks gives us the power to let Teachable know where to send that ‘hook’ when something happens on your school.
Should you use webhooks?
There are numerous reasons to use webhooks it just depends on what you need and if it’s available as data from the webhook. Teachable has good documentation for webhooks (and their API) which you can find at their official docs website. Some 3rd party services will require a webhook in order for that service to work. My own service called Witness uses Teachable webhooks to send the data from signups to our database that’s then used to present those little pop-ups, “So and so just purchased this course”.
How to set up a webhook on Teachable?
Over in the Admin area on your Teachable school, navigate to the settings area where you’ll see the menu on the left which says, “Webhooks’.
Once the page view has loaded there’s a green button to ‘add webhook’.
The modal view that appears asks for a few pieces of information. The first is the end point URL or webhook URL. This is the server endpoint that the data from the Teachable webhook will be send to. This would typically be provided to you from the 3rd party service (including the webhook option available in premium Zapier zaps).
The other options in this view are the webhook payload and to select what type of webhook. These options will again depend upon the 3rd party service you’re using and what type of data you want to send through with your webhook.
Don’t forget to save the webhook then go off and test by making a purchase or sign up that will trigger the webhook type you selected and see if it sends the data to your 3rd party service.
This is a very simply overview of webhooks on Teachable. We may go into more specific use cases in the future, leave a comment if you’d like to see something covered in a future article.
