Events

In Mechanic, an event represents something that happened — a new order, a scheduled timer firing, an incoming email, or a custom trigger. Events are the starting point for all automation: every task run begins with an event.

How events work

Each event has a topic (like shopify/orders/create) and data (the payload from Shopify or another source). Tasks declare interest in events by adding subscriptions that match specific topics. When an event arrives, Mechanic runs every task that subscribes to that event's topic.

Event sources

Events can come from several places:

• Shopify webhooks — triggered by activity in your store (orders, customers, products, fulfillments, etc.)

• Mechanic scheduler — timed events like mechanic/scheduler/daily or mechanic/scheduler/hourly

• User triggers — manual runs initiated from the Mechanic UI via mechanic/user/trigger

• Custom events — events fired by tasks using the Event action, enabling multi-step workflows

• Incoming email — emails sent to your store's Mechanic address trigger mechanic/emails/received

• Error events — mechanic/errors/task, mechanic/errors/action, and mechanic/errors/event fire when something goes wrong

In this section

• Event topics — a complete index of all available event topics

• Event filters — selectively skip events before they reach your tasks