Transcription
You can now run your entire Shopify store directly inside of Claude using Shopify's official AI toolkit. This was released by the president of Shopify, Harley Finkelstein, just a week ago, and it's kind of a big deal. This allows you to use the toolkit to connect right into Claude and all of its AI capabilities. And unless you've been living under a rock for the last few months, Claude is a whole AI ecosystem. It's not just a chatbot. It can think for you. It can create things for you, and it can even do tasks for you. So, if you plug those things together, it can run your entire Shopify store.
And that's exactly what I've done. So, in this video, I'm going to show you the simplest and easiest way to set up Claude and the Shopify AI toolkit, and I'm going to give you three use cases that you can be using right now to grow your store. Let's go.
So, Shopify provides some instructions on how to install this toolkit, but there's three different ways, and all of them are a little bit funky and technical. So, I'm going to show you exactly what to do, whether you're technical or not, okay? So, the three ways are install a plugin, which is probably the best version cuz it updates itself. You can install skills directly into Claude, or you can use the dev MCP server, which is a little bit technical. We're going to choose the install plugin method. I'm going to show you how to get past some errors that you're probably facing if you've tried this before.
So, in order to install the toolkit, you are going to obviously need Claude, but you're going to be using Claude code, which is part of the paid plan. So, if you're on the free plan, you're going to need to upgrade to the paid plan in order to get access to Claude code. So, let's head over to Claude now, and let's get started.
I want you to make sure you're in the Claude code section. So, that the chat one is here. We've got co-work here, and we've got code here. So, make sure you're in code. I want you to click new session. Then, I want you to choose a folder that you want to install this into. I've created my own little Shopify AI toolkit folder. You can do it wherever you like, but that just means that we keep it all neat in one spot. Then, I want you to make sure that you change the model here from Opus to Sonnet. We don't need to have the expensive model Opus doing this. We can absolutely do it with the Sonnet model. All right.
So, now let's head back to Shopify, and we're going to copy some instructions. We're going to scroll down to the plugin section, and we're going to copy this code here. And I'm going to show you this is where most people get it wrong. They go back to Claude, and they go into this chat, and they paste in this plugin. But it doesn't work, okay? This is what happens. It'll say, "Plugin isn't available at the moment." And then everyone gets a little bit stuck, and they're like, "What do I do?"
Now, the reason this doesn't work is plugin is a terminal command. And inside of Claude code, there's two versions. There's this desktop app which we're using now, and then there's a terminal version. And the terminal version is the one that has a little bit more power than this desktop app. Now, in order to access the terminal version, we need to press control and the little flick icon. Uh I'll put it down here so you can see it. What that does is that brings up this terminal window here. And this is where we can talk to Claude to do a little bit of extra capabilities. So, type in Claude here to make sure that you've got it installed. It's going to pop up like this. We're going to see the Claude here. And this is where we can now put in the uh plugin term. So, we're going to now paste that in and press enter, okay? So, it says it successfully added the marketplace Shopify AI toolkit. So, that's step one.
We're going to head back to the Shopify instructions page, and we're going to copy the next bit. And this is it installing the actual plugin. Just press copy here. Head back to Claude. Paste it in the terminal, and it's going to now install it, okay? So, if you can't read that very well, we can make this pop out a little bit so you can see it. But you can have a look here. It's giving you a few options. It's going install for you, which is everyone, install for anyone else that might use this computer, install for you only. I just do the install for you as it's just you using the computer, okay? So, I'm just going to press enter there. You can see it now says install Shopify plugin, and then we need to run reload plugins to apply. And I'll show you why that is. So, if I go into here and I press a forward slash, and I type in the word Shopify, there's nothing in here, okay? But if I now go and reload these pri- plugins, so I'll do reload, we can just press tab, reload plugins. It's reloaded one plugin, which is the one that we've installed, and we're good to go. So, now we should be able to type in shop here. If that doesn't come through, we just need to restart Claude. So, we're just going to do that now. Just going to quick Claude, and then we're going to open it up again. And we can head back to that chat. Right, where everything's going in. Uh now it's probably bugging out a little bit, so we can close that out. And we can now go forward slash here, type in Shopify, and now you can see you've got all these Shopify uh skills in here that are going to be constantly updated with the plugin. And we don't need to go back to terminal at all now. We can just use it directly inside this chat. Plus, we could use it in our own sessions here. Run and grab a brand new session, and we can see we've got the Shopify commands there.
Now, in order to understand what each of these skills does, if you just go and hover over them, you can see it actually has a little description next to each of these, and it tells you how you can use each one. A lot of them are sort of developer-ish and things like that, but other ones you can definitely use as an admin. So, uh go through and just see which one of these actually apply to you. Now, if you were to just reference Shopify itself inside a prompt, it's going to go and look at these skills and try and choose the best skill for you. But if you know exactly which skill you want to use, you could just forward through and actually get that skill directly. So, now we can see if we press forward slash and type in the word Shopify, we've got all of these Shopify uh capabilities now inside of Claude. Like there's heaps of them in here. All right. So, it's really, really powerful. We can basically do anything that we want.
So, what we've got to do now is we've got to connect your Shopify store into Claude. So, we've got to authenticate it. So, we're going to type in here, "Authenticate my Shopify store. Authenticate my Shopify store for the Shopify AI toolkit." It's going to go and look for skills that match this uh criteria, and it's going to give you instructions on how we're going to do this. You can see it's running that skill, Shopify plugin, Shopify admin execution. So, it's asking us what to run here, and it's giving asking us some questions, right? So, we're just going to give them the store domain. So, in order to get this, you're going to head back to your Shopify store. We're just going to get this part of the URL here, okay? Which in my store is get those-co. Yours will be completely different. It could be a number. It could be anything. So, we're going to go back to Claude, and one is get those-co. .myshopify.com. So, the question two asks, "What access do you need to your Shopify store?" I'm just going to give it a broad explanation of what we want to do. We want to use it to operate and analyze our Shopify data. And then we press enter. And it's going to go and try and set this up for us. Okay. What we can actually do here is we just click play here. It then will go and authenticate your browser, and we can see it's making sure that we're connected. We click update here, okay? Authentication successful. Awesome. Let's head back to Claude. That's all done, okay? We scroll down here, and we can just say, uh this is now authenticated. So, it's agreed that it's authenticated, which is awesome.
So, now we're going to do here is we're just going to test that it works. "What is my conversion rate over the last 30 days on my Shopify store?" Now, sometimes it will pop up and ask you to to approve. So, press allow, always allow. Now, the first few times that you run commands like this, it is going to take a little bit of extra steps to go through, but once it's actually connected, all these steps will be pre-approved, and you can just start to interrogate it and ask it questions. Now, sometimes it will come in and give you the commands to do it for you. So, I actually just want it to go and do it for me myself. So, I'm going to actually ask it that. "I don't want to run the command. I want you to do it for me and just give me back the results." So, that is now done that. It's summarized the conversion rate, the sessions, the orders, and sales over the last last 30 days. Cool thing is, it's also given us a summary, which is great, and how we compare to, all right? And then saying, "What do we want to do next? Break down a few angles." So, you can see it's even given us some commentary around these results. And this is where we can now start chatting with it back and forth and getting it to do things for you.
So, let's break down three ways that I'm using it right now to improve my Shopify store. The first one is we're going to use it to do some SEO hygiene on our store. We're going to check to see whether our store is well optimized and everything is done right. And one of the best optimization tactics is making sure that all our images have something called alt tags on it. And we can use this AI toolkit to go and search our store and find us any gaps. The prompt I'm going to use is something like this. "I now want you to look at all the images on my store, check their alt tags, and make sure that they are SEO optimized, and then bring me back a report telling me the ones that I need to work on." Okay? And then we press enter.
Okay. So, it looks like it's started to give me some answers there. It's got an SEO alt tag audit, and it's laid out to a nice table for me. It's audited 34 of my products and 194 images, and it's gone through sort of the key things from SEO. Missing alt text, generic file names, too short, too long. You can see I pass here. Got duplicates though that we need to fix. Exact product title, too. Healthy descriptive uh alt. So, it's given me a pretty good one. The good news is every image has an alt text. It hasn't any garbage in there. That's great. Uh but now it's telling me critical alt text references for the wrong product. So, it's basically saying me what's wrong here and what I need to improve, okay? It's done internal test. It's basically done everything that, you know, a smart AI can do for us. It's told us pattern issues. It's basically done everything here, and it's given me a recommended next step. So, it says I can generate proposed alt text for every problem image. So, it's going to uh propose it for us, output a CSV for me to review, and then bulk update, okay? Uh so, we could go ahead and do that if you wanted to do it, come through, or you can just ask it to do it for you, okay? So, we can see here that this is really powerful. Rather than going through every image individually, making sure they have alt text, it's done it for us, right? So, we run this all the time when we upload new images, and we just get it to update the alt text for us. So, you can sort of see how powerful this is already. You know, in the past, we would have had to go into every product individually, look at every image, look at every piece of alt text. Then we're going to change it ourselves, make sure it's right. But here we can just bulk export, bulk import, ask the AI to do it for us, and it's going to do it. But that's getting sort of the SEO side of things up and running.
What about conversion rates, right? One of the most important things about conversion rate is finding out which pages are converting better than others and trying to improve the ones that aren't and trying to send more traffic to the ones that are. So, I use a prompt like this that gets me a really good understanding of conversion rates. I want to know which pages on my store have the best conversion rate based on the amount of sessions that they are getting. The idea is I want to find out high converting pages and low converting pages. Can you please do some analysis and report back? Now, while this is doing this, if you guys want access to all these prompts, I'm going to put a little prompt list down below. You can click that and and get the prompts that I'm saying inside of here, plus all AI prompts that I use and that's going to be down in the description. So, make sure you grab that. It's going to speed up your time to AI that we're doing here. All right, those results are now coming in. That is really cool. We can see we've got lots of things in here. Let me scroll up while that's coming out. Got a page level conversion report 30 days and it's telling me a whole heap of detail about what pages I need to work on, what's underperforming, what's performing, all those sorts of things. So, some really detailed information and then where to optimize, which is really cool.
Now, this is really great because we can pull in data and get analysis, but you know, you could probably do that inside Shopify. So, what's so great about Claude? Well, the cool thing about Claude is we can connect into other systems. So, we can connect into Klaviyo, we can connect into Canva, we can connect into Microsoft Clarity. We can basically connect into any system that we have and then we can start to run automations, routines, everything like that. So, right now we're just using it to interrogate data, but we can actually get it to create things. We could get it to create, you know, bulk listings of products, you know, edit product listings, edit pages. We could get it to develop themes, we could get it to respond to people. You basically get it to do anything that you can do on your Shopify store in the Shopify admin, this Claude AI integration does it.
I want to take you through the final use case that I've been using in this past week and that is understanding how to increase my average order value. So, let's now put this prompt in here. I want to increase my average order value. Can you run a report to find out what products people are buying more than one of or products that I should be trying to sell together based on the data that you have. And here it is. It's got the report for us. It's basically told us everything that we need to do. Hero products, opportunities, everything here. So, this is something I can action right now. Putting bundles together, everything. And if you look at this in detail, we could probably get it to actually build this onto our store for us.
So, that's managing the store, but what if you wanted to create themes and you wanted to edit your templates and make your store look good and optimize the actual store? Well, that's what this video is going to be for. So, make sure you watch that. If you want to learn how to use Claude to actually edit your Shopify store and optimize it for conversions.