Data refresh cadence
How often each data source in Ordinary refreshes, and what that means for real-time reporting.
Written by The Ordinary Team · Updated Data refresh cadence
Ordinary is a mix of real-time (webhook-driven) and scheduled (cron-driven) data. Here’s what refreshes when.
Real-time (seconds)
These fire via webhook or pixel. Latency from event to showing up in Ordinary is typically 5-30 seconds.
- Orders — Shopify
orders/create,orders/update,orders/delete. - Customers — Shopify
customers/create,customers/update,customers/delete. - Products — Shopify
products/create,products/update. - Checkouts / carts — Shopify
checkouts/create,checkouts/update. - Pixel events — page_viewed, product_viewed, collection_viewed, search_submitted, product_added_to_cart, product_removed_from_cart, cart_viewed, all checkout_* steps (started → contact → address → shipping → payment → completed), alert_displayed, ui_extension_errored. All first-party, no third-party tag manager in between. See Customer Events pixel.
- Billing state changes — Shopify
app_subscriptions/update.
Hourly
These are computed or synced on the hour.
- Meta Ads — today’s data — pulled from Meta Graph API on the hour for in-day feedback.
- Amazon Ads — today’s data — pulled hourly for the current day’s spend and sales.
- PostHog events — hourly pull of the last 6 hours of events, deduplicated.
- Shopify inventory levels — hourly pull of inventory levels; webhook doesn’t cover inventory-only changes.
- Attribution rollups — session-to-order attribution is recalculated hourly so reports stay fresh.
- Shopify revenue reconciliation — hourly check that Ordinary’s revenue totals match Shopify’s own Sales report to the cent. Drift is flagged immediately rather than discovered at month-end. See Revenue matches Shopify exactly.
Daily
These run once per day. Final daily numbers settle each morning (UTC), after the upstream platforms close out the prior day.
- Meta Ads — yesterday’s final data — settles each morning (Meta takes several hours past UTC midnight to close their reporting).
- Amazon Ads — yesterday’s final data — settles each morning.
- GA4 session data — finalized each morning for the previous day.
- Shopify GMV snapshot — refreshed daily.
- Customer totals reconciliation — runs daily. Recomputes lifetime order count, total spent, and first/last order dates for all customers to catch any drift from the live-update path.
- Creative thumbnail refresh — daily (Starter+).
Weekly
- Cohort retention recalculation — recalculates weekly.
- Top-product trend analysis — refreshes weekly.
On-demand
- Force resync last 24 hours (Settings → Integrations → Shopify) — refetches recent orders from Shopify REST.
- Refresh now (any integration card) — rate-limited to once every 15 minutes per store.
First-sync backfills
On initial install or reconnection:
- Shopify — full order history (every order in your store’s lifetime, not just recent), plus customers and products. Smaller stores finish in a few minutes; larger stores (10k-50k orders) take 10-25 minutes.
- Meta Ads — last 60 days of campaign, ad-set, and ad data.
- Amazon Ads — last 60 days of all ad types.
- GA4 — last 90 days.
- PostHog — last 30 days.
All run in the background. Progress indicators on each integration card.