Vertex: Shopify Orders to Shipping Insurance Without Manual Entry

Published 2026-08-10 by Faraz Rahimi

A microservice that catches Shopify order webhooks, queues them, and files shipping insurance for high-value electronics without duplicate filings or dropped events.

Tags: Node.js, Shopify, RabbitMQ, TypeScript, Middleware

Vertex Electronics ships laptops, monitors, and other high-value consumer electronics. Insuring those cartons by hand does not survive a good sales day. Someone will miss a line, duplicate a filing, or paste the wrong tracking number.

I built a middleware service that watches Shopify orders and files insurance against the internal manifest automatically.

What it is for

When an order is paid, the shipment already has a destination, a value, and a SKU list. That is enough to open a policy. The humans should pack boxes, not re-type invoices into a second portal.

Queued order events moving through an async processing pipeline.

The storefront cannot wait on the insurance API. Peak traffic is bursty. If you do the filing inside the webhook handler, you will drop events or time out Shopify. The webhook's only job is to accept the payload and put it on a queue.

How it technically works

The service is Node.js and TypeScript, talking to the Shopify Admin API and a PostgreSQL store, running in Docker.

Ingress verifies every webhook with HMAC SHA256 against the shared secret. Unsigned traffic never reaches the queue.

Accepted events go to RabbitMQ (Redis as a fallback path in some environments) so Shopify gets a fast 200. Workers pull jobs, normalize line items, and call the insurance manifest system. An idempotency key on order id plus fulfillment id stops double filings when Shopify retries. Failed jobs land on a dead-letter queue instead of disappearing.

PII is parsed down to what the insurer needs and encrypted at rest. The worker does not log full addresses.

A packed laptop carton getting an insurance filing as it leaves the dock.

If the queue is deep, packing does not stop. The filing catches up. That is the difference between a webhook script and a service you can leave running on a sale weekend.

Source: shopify-insurance-connector.

Original post: https://farazrahimi.com/posts/vertex-shopify-shipping-insurance-sync