Shopify MCP Tools

Shopify is now building its own infrastructure for AI-powered operations.

Today, an AI assistant is expected to do much more than simply provide product information. It should be able to research products, create and manage shopping carts, check order statuses, and understand a store's policies when necessary.

Shopify has created an MCP ecosystem to support these types of use cases.

What Does the MCP Ecosystem Mean?

MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is a protocol-based approach that enables AI agents to communicate with external systems, data, and tools in a standardized way.

For this purpose, Shopify provides different MCP servers based on their intended use cases.

At a high level, Shopify's MCP ecosystem can be grouped into three main areas.

1. From Storefront MCP to UCP-Based Agentic Commerce

Shopify's initial Storefront MCP approach allowed AI agents to search a store's product catalog and manage shopping carts.

However, Shopify's newer architecture introduces an important change: these capabilities are now handled through UCP-based Agentic Commerce.

Within this architecture, specialized components such as Storefront Catalog MCP, Cart MCP, and Checkout MCP are used for different stages of the shopping journey.

Storefront Catalog MCP

Storefront Catalog MCP enables product discovery within a Shopify store.

Agents can navigate and retrieve information from the catalog using tools such as:

• search_catalog: Searches the product catalog.
• lookup_catalog: Retrieves products or product variants.
• get_product: Retrieves detailed product information.

All of these operations can be performed within the context of a specific Shopify store.

Cart MCP

Once a product has been discovered, Cart MCP is used to manage the next stage of the shopping journey.

It provides tools for managing cart-related operations:

• create_cart: Creates a new shopping cart.
• get_cart: Retrieves the current cart.
• update_cart: Updates the contents of the cart.
• cancel_cart: Cancels the cart.

Checkout MCP

Checkout MCP is used for operations that take place after the cart stage.

It enables agents to continue the purchase journey and handle checkout-related actions.

Store policies and policy-related information can also be accessed through separate MCP capabilities designed for that purpose.

2. Customer Accounts MCP

Customer Accounts MCP provides capabilities for authenticated customers.

It is designed for customer-specific operations such as:

• Order tracking
• Account management
• Accessing authenticated customer information
• Managing customer-specific actions

In other words, this MCP is primarily used when an AI agent needs to perform operations on behalf of a signed-in Shopify customer.

3. Dev MCP

Dev MCP is designed for software developers and users who want to build applications on top of Shopify.

It provides capabilities that help developers throughout the Shopify application development process.

From this perspective, Dev MCP can be considered the foundation for a developer-focused AI agent that assists with building and working with Shopify applications.

Shopify MCP Architecture in Summary

The overall MCP architecture can be summarized as follows:

With this architecture, you can select the appropriate MCP tools depending on the task your AI agent needs to perform and build more effective, specialized Shopify workflows.