Order Management Notification Service

The Order Management Notification Service provides support for notifications, to be sent from the Flipkart system to the seller system, for any event in a shipment lifecycle, such as shipment creation, label creation, shipment cancellation, and so on. You can use this feature to improve the performance of your application by eliminating additional network and computation costs in polling resources to determine if they have changed.

Format: JSON

Notification	Description/Use Case
Shipment Created	Sent when an order is placed
Hold	Sent when an order item is flagged as “Hold”
UnHold	Sent when an order item flagged as “Hold” is released for further processing
Packed	Sent when an order item state is changed to “Packed”
Ready To Dispatch	Sent when an order item is marked as “Ready to Dispatch”
Pickup Complete	Sent when the shipment is picked up by the logistics team
Shipped	Sent when an order item is shipped
Delivered	Sent when an order item is delivered
Dispatch Dates Changed	Sent when the dispatch date is changed
Shipment Cancelled	Sent when an approved order is cancelled
Shipment Form Failed	Sent when a form generation fails
Return Created	Sent when a new return request is created
Return Tracking Id Update	Sent when an when tracking details for a customer return is updated
Return Expected Date Changed	Sent when the expected date of return of an orderItem changes
Return PickedUp	Sent when a return is picked up
Return Completed	Sent when a return is completed
Return Cancelled	Sent when a return request is revoked

Subscribing to Notifications

To use notifications:

• You must be a registered seller on https://seller.flipkart.com.
• Setup a notification receiver in your system. This is an HTTPS server that handles the API notifications triggered when a resource changes. For example: https://www.< your-website >.com/notifications-receiver.
• You should have a VAPT certificate for the notification receiver in your system.

Write to seller-api-queries@flipkart.com to subscribe to the notifications. Please provide the following details:

• Seller id / Seller registered email address
• Notification receiver URL
• VAPT certificate for the URL
• If return notifications are needed (Yes / NO)
• If Yes then Notification receiver URL for return notification( This could be same as order notification URL)
• If return notification URL is different then provide VAPT certificate for the URL
• Location ids for which you wants to listen order and return notifications

note

Even if you are a 3rd party aggregator you need to provide seller id / seller registered email address for which you will consume the events.

The proposed event structure for these notifications contain the following parameters:

Parameter Name	Description
eventType	The notification type. Possible values: shipment_created, shipment_packed, shipment_ready_to_dispatch, shipment_shipped, shipment_delivered, and so on
source	Point of origin of the notification - flipkart
timestamp	ISO time string
attributes	Custom parameters for the event

Notifications Authentication

All Flipkart Notifications are RESTful notifications that send event payloads to the seller system endpoint.

Sellers authenticate to Flipkart API using OAuth credentials (Application ID and Application Secret). Those who wish to listen to notifications must register their notification endpoints with Flipkart. Sellers need a mechanism to validate whether the request originated from Flipkart and not by untrusted sources. Flipkart REST APIs authenticate to seller notification endpoints using a signature-based authentication by using Authorization headers.

Every notification includes headers in the following format:

X_Date : <date_timestamp>
X_Authorization : FKLOGIN  Base64 (OAuth-appid : <fk_signature>)

Here,

• date_timestamp is the timestamp at which the notification is generated and is in “HTTP-Date” format.

• fk_signature is generated per request using SHA1 based message digest algorithm with values derived from request as:

SHA-1 (date_timestamp + notification_http_url + notification_http_method + OAuth-secret)

REST endpoints that receive these notifications need to authenticate the request by regenerating the Signature (fk_signature) using the logic above and verifying it with the Authorization (X_Authorization) header. Consider the following example.

Authentication Sample

Seller: PilotSeller
OAuth Appication ID: 6113ca4a-fe05-11e4-a322-1697f925ec7b
OAuth Application Secret: 669a57f4-fe05-11e4-a322-1697f925ec7b
Notification URL: http://seller.api.pilotseller.com/notify/fki POST
Timestamp: 1432026135
Signature:
SHA1(1432026135http://seller.api.pilotseller.com/notify/fkiPOST669a57f4-fe05-11e4-a322-1697f925ec7b) 83762abd87b41e66ddd58320a4e803251e72b776
Authorization Information:
Base64(6113ca4a-fe05-11e4-a322-1697f925ec7b:83762abd87b41e66ddd58320a4e803251e72b776)NjExM2NhNGEtZmUwNS0xMWU0LWEzMjItMTY5N2Y5MjVlYzdiOjgzNzYyYWJkODdiNDFlNjZkZGQ1ODMyMGE0ZTgwMzI1MWU3MmI3NzY=
Headers
X_Date: Tue, 19 May 2015 09:02:15 GMT
X_Authorization:
FKLOGIN NjExM2NhNGEtZmUwNS0xMWU0LWEzMjItMTY5N2Y5MjVlYzdiOjgzNzYyYWJkODdiNDFlNjZkZGQ1ODMyMGE0ZTgwMzI1MWU3MmI3NzY=

note

If you are an API Partner and onboarding multiple sellers on notification service with same url & need a mechanism to verify the corresponding seller for the nofication, then you can maintain seller_id <-> locationId mapping at your end. In the shipment_created event you can use the keys locationId to identify the seller and shipmentId to track the order in subsequent events.

Notifications Response

For a notification, the seller application needs to respond with a standard HTTP success status 200, or should throw an error response in the following scenarios only:

• When the seller system is down
• If the payload is incorrect

The notification system ensures that the message is sent at least once, but not only once. Hence, it is recommended to add an idempotency check in the client to avoid processing of duplicate notifications.