How to Connect Shopify to Claude for Reporting
Shopify holds your orders, customers, products, fulfilments, refunds and returns. Claude can answer questions about all of it in natural language, but Shopify's own MCP server isn't the way to do that. This guide explains what Shopify's MCP is for, and walks through connecting Shopify to Claude for reporting using Tugger's built-in MCP server, so you can ask "what was net revenue by month after refunds" or "which products are selling faster than we can restock" and get an answer from your own store data.
Shopify's MCP server is for shoppers, not for you
If you've searched for a Shopify MCP server you'll have found Shopify's own, and it's worth being clear about what it does. Shopify's MCP is built for agentic commerce: it lets AI shopping assistants browse your catalogue, answer customer questions and complete a checkout on a customer's behalf. It is a storefront tool, pointed outward at buyers.
It does not give you, the merchant, a way to ask Claude about your sales, margins, customers or returns. For that you need your store's Admin data in a place Claude can query, which is a different problem and the one this guide solves.
What you can ask once Shopify is connected to Claude
Tugger syncs your Shopify Admin data on a schedule into a managed data warehouse, then exposes that warehouse to Claude through an MCP server. Claude queries the warehouse, never your store, so the connection is read-only and nothing Claude does can touch an order or a product.
Typical questions:
- What was our net revenue by month for the last twelve months, after refunds and excluding cancelled and test orders?
- Which products are our top twenty by units sold this quarter, and what is the return rate on each?
- What is customer lifetime value by first-order month, and how does it differ for marketing-opted-in customers?
- Which orders are unfulfilled and more than three days old, by fulfilment location?
- What did we pay in payment processing fees last month, by gateway?
Claude writes the query, runs it against the warehouse and explains the result. You can follow up in the same conversation, ask for a chart, or ask Claude to compare two periods.
What you need
- A Tugger account. You can start a free 10-day trial if you don't have one.
- Owner or staff access to your Shopify store with permission to install apps.
- A Claude plan that supports connectors (Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise).
Step 1: connect Shopify to Tugger
- Log in to Tugger, go to Connectors and choose Shopify.
- Enter your store's myshopify.com address.
- Sign in to Shopify when prompted and approve the requested read permissions.
- Choose a start date for the historical orders you want to bring across and save.
Tugger runs a first sync and then refreshes on a schedule. You can see sync status and history in the Tugger dashboard. If you run more than one store, repeat for each.
Step 2: add Tugger's MCP server to Claude
- In Tugger, open AI Insights and copy your MCP server URL.
- In Claude, go to Settings, then Connectors.
- Choose Add custom connector.
- Name it "Tugger" and paste the MCP server URL.
- Click Add, then Connect, and sign in to Tugger when prompted.
In any new chat, open the connectors menu and switch Tugger on. Claude can now see the tables Tugger has synced from Shopify.
Step 3: ask your first question
"Show me net revenue by month for the last twelve months, after refunds, excluding cancelled and test orders."
That question is a good first test because it is the one most Shopify exports get wrong. Shopify's order total includes amounts that were later refunded, and test and cancelled orders sit in the same list. The warehouse carries the rule once, so Claude nets refunds off and excludes the noise every time, for whoever asks.
What syncs from Shopify
Tugger's Shopify connector syncs 42 tables through the Shopify GraphQL Admin API.
| Area | Tables |
|---|---|
| Orders | Orders, line items, non-fulfillable line items, shipping lines, discount applications and allocations, tax lines at order and line level, draft orders and draft line items |
| Payments | Transactions by gateway, transaction fees |
| Refunds and returns | Refunds, refund line items and transactions, returns, return line items with reasons, exchanges, reverse fulfilment orders |
| Fulfilment | Fulfilment orders and line items, fulfilments with tracking, fulfilment services, location moves |
| Products | Products, variants with SKUs and pricing, collections, product-collection membership, taxonomy categories, publications by sales channel |
| Customers | Customer records with addresses, marketing preferences and order statistics |
| Marketing | Marketing events and activities with channel, UTM and spend |
| Configuration | Locations, business entities, sales channels, event log |
Amounts are held in presentment currency, so if you sell in more than one currency Claude can report by currency or convert. If you need an entity that isn't listed, ask us.
Shopify alongside your stock system
Most product businesses on Shopify run their stock somewhere else, in Cin7, Unleashed or a similar system. Once both are in the Tugger warehouse, the questions that matter most become answerable in one go: which Shopify products are selling faster than stock on hand in Cin7 will cover, which SKUs have open Shopify orders against zero free stock, or how Shopify sales compare with wholesale sales out of the same inventory. No direct Shopify connector can see the other system; the warehouse can.
Why go through a warehouse rather than a direct connector?
Several tools connect an AI assistant straight to the Shopify Admin API. That works for one-off lookups, but it has three drawbacks for reporting.
- Write access. A direct Admin API connection can often edit products, orders or customers. Tugger's MCP server is read-only by design, so a mistyped question can't change anything in your store.
- Query load and history. "Lifetime value by first-order cohort" means every order and every customer. Pulling that through the API each time is slow and runs into Shopify's rate limits. Tugger syncs once on a schedule and the history is already there.
- Single source. Once Shopify is in the warehouse alongside Xero and your stock system, Claude can answer questions that span them, such as matching Shopify payouts to Xero bank transactions.
Tugger is UK-based and ISO 27001:2022 certified, and the warehouse runs on Azure in the UK by default or in any Azure region on request. The same warehouse also feeds Power BI and Tableau, and the MCP server works with Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini.
Related guides
- Why Claude needs a data warehouse behind it
- How to connect Cin7 to Claude
- How to connect Unleashed to Claude
- How to connect Xero to Claude
- What is an MCP server?
- How to build a Claude dashboard
Get started
Connecting Shopify to Claude for reporting with Tugger takes no code and no faff. Try Tugger free for 10 days or book a demo and we'll walk through it with your own store data.
