How to connect ChatGPT and Claude to your ecommerce store

TL;DR

• • MCP is the standard that lets an assistant use a tool, not just describe it.
• • Connected to a store, it can add products, edit content and publish.
• • It acts as you, with your permissions — nothing more.
• • Free on every SitesPlaced plan.
• • Review before publishing. An assistant is confident even when it is wrong.

What this is, and what it is not

Most 'AI website builder' features generate a page you then copy somewhere, or produce code you have to deploy. That is a text generator with a nice wrapper.

MCP — the Model Context Protocol — is different in kind. It lets an assistant call real functions on a real system. Connected to a store, that means ChatGPT or Claude can genuinely add a product, rewrite a section, change a price and publish the result. You describe the change in a sentence; the change happens.

The practical version: 'add these six products from the photos I just sent, priced at ₹1,200 each, and publish' is a thing you can say, rather than a thing you do forty times in a form.

How the connection is authorised

You add the store's MCP endpoint to your assistant, and authorise it against your own account. The assistant then acts as you — it can see the stores you own and change the things you could change, and nothing else.

That boundary is the whole security model and it is worth checking on any platform you connect. An MCP integration that operates with elevated permissions, or that can reach stores other than yours, is a much bigger surface than it looks.

On SitesPlaced the connector is free on every plan, and every action runs as the authenticated user rather than as a service account.

What it is genuinely good at

• • Bulk product entry — the single most tedious task in running a store.
• • Rewriting copy across a section or a whole page in one instruction.
• • Building a first draft of a site from a description, which you then edit.
• • Answering questions about your own store — what is out of stock, what has not sold.

What it is not good at is taste and truth. It will confidently write a product description containing a material you do not use, and it has no idea whether your prices make sense. Treat its output as a first draft by a fast, tireless assistant who has never seen your products.

The guardrails worth having

An assistant that can edit your live store is a genuinely useful tool and a genuinely sharp one. Three habits make it safe:

• • Review before publishing. Ask it to make changes, then look, then publish. Do not chain 'and publish it' onto a bulk edit you have not seen.
• • Be specific about scope. 'Update the description on the blue kurta' is safe. 'Tidy up all the descriptions' is forty changes you now have to check.
• • Check prices by hand, always. This is the one place a confident mistake costs real money — an assistant that misreads ₹1,200 as ₹120 will not hesitate.

If you do not have the website yet

Everything above assumes you already have a store to put an AI assistant on.

A SitesPlaced store is free to build and publish, with 0% commission on every sale, on every plan, and 21 integrations included rather than sold as add-ons.

The MCP connector is free on every SitesPlaced plan. Setup details: the SitesPlaced MCP server.

Frequently asked questions