100% Uptime, Zero Data Loss: How Hookdeck Helped Supercycle Process Millions of Shopify Events Reliably

Supercycle was founded to help merchants maximize the lifetime revenue they make from each product they manufacture. Built for Shopify, the platform makes it easy for brands to add circular commerce, resale, rental, trade-in, and repair to the same storefront where they sell new products.

Everything runs from one checkout, with automated and serialized inventory tracking, returns, and swaps.

Ryan Atkins built Supercycle after running one of the UK’s largest Shopify agencies. There, he saw two problems that modern e-commerce hadn’t solved.

Supercycle changes that by bringing circular revenue back under the merchant’s control.

The company combines Ryan’s background in e-commerce and love for pre-loved goods into one mission: helping brands grow responsibly while staying profitable.

The challenge

As Supercycle’s circular commerce platform scaled, its webhook pipeline struggled to keep up. Every product update, inventory change, or order modification triggered events from Shopify, often thousands at once.

As more merchants joined, the volume turned into an avalanche. One large import or warehouse update could trigger tens of thousands of payloads within minutes, bringing the app’s backend to a crawl. The team used Sidekiq for background jobs, but without filtering or rate control, their servers would stall.

The team initially planned to address the issue later, treating it as a background project. That changed the day webhook traffic took down production. Suddenly, it wasn’t a technical nuisance; it was a full stop.

Ryan and Arthur Cheek briefly explored AWS EventBridge and Google Pub/Sub, but the setup complexity didn’t make sense for their lean, fast-moving team. They needed a solution that offered control and visibility without a rebuild.

Supercycle’s growing pains came from:

• Avalanche of inventory and product update webhooks
• Repeated retries with no control or visibility
• Failed or missing events that stalled updates
• Manual debugging that slowed every deployment
• Overloaded infrastructure from unfiltered traffic

The solution

Supercycle’s webhook bottlenecks had escalated from a background task to a critical outage. When Ryan and Arthur revisited their earlier plan to fix it, they ruled out AWS EventBridge and Pub/Sub as too complex and too time-consuming. They needed something they could trust and deploy immediately.

Ryan first found Hookdeck through Shopify’s official developer docs. After hours of confusion with EventBridge, he followed the links to Hookdeck’s site and instantly understood how it worked. Within a day, they signed up and rerouted traffic.

A buffer that absorbed chaos

Once integrated, Hookdeck became the invisible buffer between Shopify and Supercycle’s internal systems.

It absorbed massive bursts of inventory updates, queued them safely, and released them in manageable waves. The team finally had visibility; each event could be tracked, replayed, or filtered.

When downtime struck, Hookdeck held payloads until the app was ready. Lost or duplicate events were no longer a concern.

Filtering noise before it hits

Hookdeck’s deduplication and filtering let the team decide exactly which fields mattered. They could now ignore redundant events and reduce load by filtering updates that only changed stock counts.

Fast adoption, lasting confidence

Adopting Hookdeck took less than a day. Arthur swapped a single webhook URL using Shopify’s new declarative setup, and traffic instantly stabilized.

The decision was cemented by trust, Hookdeck’s strong developer content, clean UI, and customer references like Gorgias.

Hookdeck helped Supercycle regain:

• Control over unpredictable webhook floods
• Real-time visibility across every event
• Confidence in retry and replay safety
• Faster deployments without incident risk
• A scalable system ready for growth

The result

After integrating Hookdeck, Supercycle’s webhook traffic finally stabilized. The system could now handle thousands of Shopify product updates, order changes, and rental events without interruptions or lost payloads.

Reliability as a baseline

The system handled Shopify’s heavy webhook loads effortlessly. Product and inventory updates no longer stall deployments or trigger outages. When large catalogs synced, Hookdeck absorbed the bursts, and the app kept running.

For Ryan and Arthur, reliability stopped being something they thought about. Hookdeck ran quietly in the background, queuing, filtering, and replaying events without manual checks or intervention.

Visibility without the firefight

Hookdeck’s dashboard gave the developers a clear view into every inbound event. They could see what came in, what got filtered, and when something was retried.

When Shopify sent massive imports, the queue graphs showed exactly how Hookdeck handled the load.

Filtering that paid off

Deduplication turned out to be the quiet hero. Hookdeck’s filters cut out nearly all redundant Shopify product updates, especially inventory changes that made up over 90% of webhook volume. That change alone kept queues light and deployments consistent.

The outcomes:

• Zero webhook-related downtime for over a year
• Visibility into every Shopify event
• Manual debugging time eliminated
• Confidence to scale circular commerce on Shopify

A stable foundation for circular commerce

Hookdeck turned Supercycle’s biggest operational drag into invisible stability. Before integration, developers lost hours every week hunting missing payloads and retrying failed imports. The process stalled feature work and caused unpredictable delays during releases.

Now, the engineers build without distraction. They can focus on features that push circular commerce forward, like integrated rentals, automated resale tracking, and item condition workflows, without worrying that a webhook flood will take them down.

Building confidently for more merchants and platforms

With new features like event cancellation and advanced deduplication, Supercycle plans to refine webhook handling even further. The team’s confidence in Hookdeck’s queueing and filtering means they can add more merchants, more data sources, and even explore non-Shopify channels.

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