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Workflows·6 min read·

Connect your Shopify store to Claude and stop guessing why last month dipped

A 5-minute connector setup that turns your Shopify dashboard from a speedo into a diagnostics port.

Your dashboard tells you the speed. It never tells you what's making the noise.

Shopify analytics is a speedo. Sessions up, conversion down, revenue flat. Useful for about 4 seconds, and then you're stuck, because a speedo can tell you you're going slower than last week and absolutely nothing about why.

So you do what everyone does. You export a CSV, you open it, you stare at it, you close it. Or you go product by product in the admin, clicking between orders and inventory and customers, holding half the numbers in your head and losing them by the third tab. An hour later you have a vibe, not an answer, and the vibe is usually "I should post more."

Connecting your store to Claude puts a diagnostics port on the car. Instead of reading the gauges, you ask a question in plain English and Claude goes and pulls the actual data behind it. Setup takes about 5 minutes and you only do it once.

I use this the first Monday of every month. It takes 20 minutes and replaces the afternoon I used to lose to spreadsheets.

What's inside

  • The exact steps to add Shopify as a connector in Claude, no developer app required.
  • A monthly diagnostic prompt that finds the cause, not just the number.
  • The one guardrail to set before you give any AI access to a live store.

What you need

  • A Shopify store you own or have admin access to.
  • Claude, on a paid plan (connectors aren't available on free).
  • 5 minutes and your Shopify login.

Connect the store

  1. 1Open Claude, go to Settings, then Connectors, then Manage connectors.
  2. 2Choose Add custom connector.
  3. 3Paste in Shopify's official hosted MCP endpoint: https://setup.shopify.com/mcp
  4. 4Save, then hit Connect. A Shopify login window opens. Sign in and approve access to the store you want.
  5. 5Back in Claude, start a new chat and type "which of my products sold the most units in the last 30 days?" If you get real product names back, you're connected.

One thing before you go further

Turn off any write permissions you don't need, and never let Claude change prices, stock levels or product copy without you reading the change first. This connector exists so you can ask better questions of your own data. It doesn't exist to make your commercial decisions, and a store is a bad place to find out the difference the hard way.

The prompt

Run this once a month. It's built to find causes, not to hand you a summary you already knew.

Prompt
You have access to my Shopify store through the connector. Act as a commercial analyst who has run a small e-commerce business, not a report generator.

Pull the data yourself. Where a number is unavailable, say so rather than estimating.

Compare the last 30 days to the 30 days before it, and to the same 30 days last year if that data exists. Then work through this:

1. WHAT MOVED. The 5 metrics that changed most, with the actual numbers and the percentage change. Ignore anything that moved less than 5%, it's noise.

2. THE CAUSE CHAIN. For the biggest change, trace it back as far as the data allows. If revenue dropped, was it traffic, conversion rate, average order value, or repeat rate? Then go one level deeper on whichever one it was. Keep going until you hit either a real cause or the limit of what the data can tell you. Say clearly which one you hit.

3. WHAT'S QUIETLY WORKING. Find the product, collection, customer segment or traffic source that's growing but too small for me to have noticed. Tell me what it's growing at and what it would be worth if I gave it real attention.

4. WHAT'S QUIETLY LEAKING. Products with high views and low conversion. Customers who bought twice and then stopped. Stock sitting still. Anything where money is already on the table and falling off it.

5. THE THREE QUESTIONS I SHOULD BE ASKING. Based on what you found, what am I not curious about that I should be? These should be questions I can answer with the next month of data.

Rules:
- Show me the numbers behind every claim. If you can't show a number, label it a hypothesis.
- Do not recommend actions in this response. I want the diagnosis first, uncontaminated by suggestions.
- Where two explanations fit the same data, give me both and tell me which evidence would separate them.
- Australian English. Plain language. No dashboards, no bullet soup, write it like you're explaining it to me over a coffee.

How to use it

  1. 1Run it on the first Monday of the month, before you've formed an opinion about how the month went. Running it after you've decided just gets you agreement.
  2. 2Read the cause chain first and skip straight past section 1. You already know the headline numbers. Section 2 is the bit you're paying for.
  3. 3Only after you've read the diagnosis, start a second message asking "what would you do about number 4?" Keeping diagnosis and prescription in separate messages stops Claude reverse-engineering a tidy story to justify a recommendation.
  4. 4Make it yours: Add a line naming your margins by product category. Claude will stop optimising for revenue and start optimising for what you actually keep, which is a very different conversation.

Bonus: Ask why a specific product stalled

Pull everything you can on a product for the last 90 days and diagnose whether it has a traffic, listing, price, or demand problem.

Prompt
Pull everything you can on [product name] for the last 90 days: units, revenue, views, conversion rate, returns, and which other products it gets bought alongside. Then tell me whether this product has a traffic problem, a listing problem, a price problem or a demand problem. Be specific about which evidence points where, and tell me what you'd need to see to be sure.

Bonus: Find your real repeat customers

Segment customers by purchase behaviour and find the first purchase that most reliably predicts a repeat customer.

Prompt
Using my order data, segment my customers by purchase behaviour, not by demographics. Show me: one-time buyers, people who bought twice within 90 days, and anyone who's bought 3 or more times. For each group, tell me what their first purchase usually was and their average lifetime value. Then tell me which first purchase most reliably predicts a repeat customer, and how confident you are given the sample size.

Bonus: Prep the decision, don't make it

Use Claude to build a keep-or-cut case for a product, including the revenue and opportunity cost beyond direct sales.

Prompt
I'm deciding whether to discontinue [product]. Pull its full performance history, its stock position, and what it contributes beyond direct revenue (bundles, first purchases, repeat triggers). Lay out the case for keeping it and the case for cutting it, with numbers on both sides. Tell me what I'd be giving up that isn't obvious from the sales figure. Do not tell me what to do, I'm making this call.

Do this today: connect the store and ask it one question you've been meaning to look up. That's the whole first step, and it takes 5 minutes.

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