Amazon Eventbridge and Shopify: can anyone explain how this works?

My company has been sitting on a pile of AWS credits for a couple years now, and we recently were offered a separate $10,000 credit to build on Eventbridge (as in Amazon will pay for up to $10,000 in development for us to build something using Eventbridge). My basic understand is that Eventbridge takes "events" like someone placing an order, or clicking into a certain part of the site, and allows those events to get routed to other applications in some kind of code-less manner. What I'm trying to figure out is what that means in practice. Like, if a customer starts a wholesale order, Eventbridge could add that user to a Freshworks list and automation for potential wholesale customers. That much I'm pretty sure it can do. But what I don't know if it can do is if someone goes into the wholesale section, can it have Shopify generate a popup asking for that individual's email address (maybe offering some kind of discount)? Can it only do that if there's an Eventbridge integrated app that creates pop ups like that? Can it not do anything like that?

I have to get back to Amazon by the end of the month with a proposal for what we want to build, and I'm not one to throw away free money, so any help in explaining what the hell it is exactly that Eventbridge does and can do (particularly in a Shopify context) would be real helpful.

tbrown_01923 said:

Okay I am technical by nature, but not up on eventbridge. But i looked quickly there are eventbridge targets - which all look like building blocks of applciations and not applications themselves, largely bits of code, or things that are proxies for bits of code. Then there are eventbridge API destinations which look to (mostly) be applications - here is where you see "zendesk" "slack" etc https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-api-destinations-with-amazon-eventbridge/

Here is a list of marketed integrations: https://aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/integrations/

If you need to integrate with something that is not in there, I would consider what I wanted connected and then ask Amazon whether they can make that happen with eventbridge or not. Alternatively you couldlook up each of those tools and see if and how they interconnect with the eventbridge ecosystem

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Yeah, I saw Freshworks in that list which is what prompted the use case I was thinking of. I took a look at the API destinations link, but that's a bit beyond my technical understanding...I recognize a lot of the words, but in the words of Austin Powers, whoopdedoo, what does it all mean, Basil?

AlNipper49 said:

I'm not sure that it could actually have Shopify generate a popup, but if Shopify can generate popups from an API then it could. Think of it as less actions between the applications and more of exchange data between applications. Depending on the application that can definitely generate an action, but it largely depends on the software rather than Eventbridge.

If this is a big application for your company the bigger "risk" I'd see here is dedicating resources towards it as it will basically need to be stuck on Amazon forever, which is why they are offering these credits. Take a one-time hit to generate locked-in recurring business.

Your assumptions and line of thinking is correct. You should come up with a list of things that you want/assume AWS can do and put the burden on Amazon to describe if they can or cannot do it. My gut in this instance is that you'd probably need to engage a developer long-term to support it past the 10k credit and it would likely not be worth it. With that said, it mostly depends on what you do, the volume, how it is currently built, how much time doing this manually takes, can existing applications like Shopify mimic this functionality natively and how much you can spend to make this a value proposition.

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That's a fair assessment of the risk/reward profile, although at this point in time the consideration is also "what's something that would be valuable that we can't afford to build or otherwise create ourselves that we might be able to do here". In the use case I have envisioned, that is something we'd probably be willing to support long term if it worked as planned; right now I have no way to find out if a retailer/distributor/what have you is checking out our site unless they actively take the step to send us an email through one of our contact forms. If we could more proactively reach those visitors, get their contact info, and get them into our lead pipeline, that would be valuable and worth maintaining. I guess the next step is probably to ask Shopify what the hell Eventbridge can do. All I've found is that it streamlines "webhooks"...which is a term I remember from my old startup as being something we had to do at one point to make things work more seamlessly, but what the hell that actually means in the context of Shopify's feature set I still don't really understand.