Store platform

Shopify Catalog MCP

Shopify's Catalog MCP gives shopping agents access to product catalogs: a global catalog across Shopify merchants and a per-store catalog, so an assistant can search, compare and surface products.

What it is and why it matters

What it does

• Search products across the global Shopify catalog or one store
• Return product details, variants and prices for agent shopping flows
• Feed shopping assistants that then use Storefront MCP for cart and checkout
• Part of Shopify's agentic commerce stack alongside UCP

Best for

Merchants who want their catalog discoverable by AI shopping assistants, and developers building agents that shop across Shopify stores.

How to connect it

1. Read the Global Catalog MCP page in the Shopify documentation and decide whether you need cross-merchant search (Global Catalog) or a single store (Storefront Catalog MCP), as the documentation describes.
2. Prepare an agent UCP profile. As described in the documentation, every request needs a meta.ucp-agent.profile URL. If you host your own profile, declare the base catalog search and lookup capabilities plus Shopify's global catalog extension. The documentation also mentions a hosted example profile you can use while testing.
3. Point your MCP client at the catalog endpoint given in the documentation and send a tools/list request to confirm that search_catalog, lookup_catalog and get_product are returned. If a tool is missing, check which capabilities your profile advertises.
4. For a no-code route, install the Shopify AI Toolkit as described in the documentation. It adds the ucp skill for Cursor, Claude Code and other compatible IDEs, so you can ask for products in plain language. The same page also lists a ucp catalog command for terminals.
5. Start with read-only searches. Add country and price filters and keep the result limit small. Use the documented option to scope to one merchant when you only want a single store's products.
6. If you need personalized results for signed-in Shop customers, follow the documentation on buyer-linked tokens and the catalog search read scope. Do this only after basic search works.

Exact commands and addresses change. Use the official documentation for the current steps.

Installation guide for Shopify Catalog MCP

Client-by-client steps, what to prepare, the first prompts to run and fixes for common errors.

ClaudeChatGPTGeminiMicrosoft CopilotPerplexityCursorClaude Code

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Questions you can ask it

• Find crewneck sweaters under $50 that ship to the US and show the options from different merchants.
• Search for trail running shoes in black, size 10, with a variant rating of at least 4.5, and list the price tiers.
• Look up this product variant ID and tell me whether it is currently available and what it costs.
• Find items that look like this product photo, limited to secondhand condition, and summarize the top three.

What it cannot do

• It does not handle cart or checkout. The listing says shopping assistants use Storefront MCP for that after discovery.
• It cannot be used without an agent UCP profile. Requests need a profile URL, and the tools returned depend on the capabilities it declares.
• It does not guarantee exact totals or complete data. total_count is an estimate, pagination stops at 1,000 results, and Inferred fields may be missing or inaccurate.

Staying safe

• The catalog tools described (search, lookup, get product) are discovery tools. Keep your agent read-only and do not connect it to checkout actions until a person supervises the flow.
• Personalized search uses a buyer-linked token for a signed-in Shop customer. Request only the scope the documentation names, and handle customer data under your privacy obligations.
• Do not present Inferred fields such as generated descriptions or feature lists as merchant-written claims. Check them against the merchant's own product page before using them in ads or customer-facing copy. If you enable promoted placements on a saved catalog, review the vendor's disclosure requirements first.

Watch out for: Part of fast-moving agentic commerce work. Endpoints, availability and tool names change; confirm the current state in the docs before building on it.

Frequently asked questions