How to Run 80% of Your Shopify Store with Claude
By Brendan Gillen, Founder & AI SpecialistPublished · Updated · 4 min read
In short
To run most of a Shopify store with Claude: connect Shopify, Klaviyo, Gmail and your other tools as connectors in the desktop app, set every write action to ask permission, work in Cowork with a project for your store, then schedule the repetitive jobs: customer service triage twice a day, a weekly conversion review, review replies, a Monday performance check-in and a monthly SEO brief.
Claude now runs about 80% of my Shopify store. It drafts the replies to customer emails, builds the email campaigns, reviews the store's conversion data every week, approves and answers product reviews, and researches what to improve next. Most of it happens on a schedule while I am away from the laptop. This is the exact setup: the connectors, how I use Cowork, and the scheduled tasks that do the repetitive work.
Step 1: Connect your tools
Open the Claude desktop app (this does not work in the browser). Go to Customize, Connectors, click the plus and browse. A connector lets Claude use a tool on your behalf, so you stop logging into that tool yourself. My stack:
| Connector | What Claude uses it for |
|---|---|
| Shopify | Orders, products, analytics, editing the store |
| Klaviyo | Reading past campaigns, building new ones |
| Gmail | Reading customer emails and drafting replies |
| Microsoft Clarity | Heatmaps and session data for conversion reviews |
| Google Drive | Files and spreadsheets |
| Canva, Higgsfield | Designs and UGC-style creative |
| Semrush | Keyword research for SEO briefs |
| Notion, Slack, Zapier | Calendar, team chat, custom automations |
| GitHub, Descript | Code and video editing |
You need an account with each tool. Start with Shopify, Klaviyo and Gmail; add the rest as you need them.
Set access levels carefully
When you add a connector, each action gets one of three permissions: always allow, ask permission, or block. Do not choose always allow for anything that writes to your store. Choose ask permission, and block any write action you never want Claude to take. I have watched people set everything to always allow and break their stores. A human has to stay in the middle. AI does the 80%; you keep the 20% that needs judgment.
Step 2: Use Cowork, not Chat, for tasks
Claude has three modes and I use each for a different job:
- Chat for research and thinking out loud.
- Code for building things, like themes.
- Cowork for doing tasks: go and do something, report back. This is my daily driver.
Create a project in Cowork for your store. A project is a folder that holds what Claude learns about your business, so it gets better over time. Then confirm the connectors work with simple questions: "What was my best-selling product on Shopify?" "What was the last campaign I sent in Klaviyo?" Watch the right-hand panel to see which tool it reaches for.
One prompt, three tools: a campaign from scratch
You do not need to name tools or write clever prompts. I typed, in plain language:
I want to create a sales campaign for the end of the month. Look at my best-selling product, my best-performing campaign and the product with the most views, then come up with a campaign idea.
Cowork built a checklist of steps, pulled from Shopify, Klaviyo and Clarity, used the brand data in my project, and came back with "Warm Up Winter", an end-of-month sale with an offer, a theme, VIP early access and four emails structured on our email framework. It then offered to draft the emails, build them in Klaviyo and create the discounts in Shopify. Hours of work in a few minutes, and the decisions stayed with me.
Step 3: Put the repetitive work on a schedule
Scheduled tasks are where the time comes back. Click the scheduled tasks icon in Cowork and describe the job and the frequency. These are mine:
- Customer service triage, 9am and 2pm daily. Reads the support inbox, checks the order in Shopify, understands the thread, and drafts a reply in Gmail. I read and click send. It is accurate enough that this alone saves hours a week.
- Weekly Clarity review. Pulls Clarity and Shopify data, finds dead clicks and scroll drop-offs, and recommends conversion changes. We make the changes with Claude Code, tell the task what we changed, and the next review reports whether it worked.
- Reviews. Checks Judge.me, approves genuine reviews and replies to them.
- Monday store performance check-in. Sales, what is winning, what is losing.
- Monthly SEO content brief. Keyword research, competitor ranking, blog ideas and page optimisations.
- Community check. A daily list of posts in our member community that need a reply from me.
Each task is small. Together they replace most of a store manager's morning. We have only run them for a few weeks, and we add a new one every time we connect a new tool.
Where to start
Pick the one task you do every day that follows the same steps. Customer service triage is the usual answer. Connect Gmail and Shopify, describe the steps, set it to draft only, and run it for a week before you trust it further. Then add the next task.
Want to go beyond running the store and start optimising it? Claude Code can edit your theme. Want these tasks built for you? That is the point of EcomOS, and our straight answer on what AI can and cannot run is worth a read first.
