Shopify
Connect your Shopify store once and your agents are answering from your catalog, orders, and inventory. Setup takes about five minutes, happens entirely inside Cuneiform Chat, and needs no theme edits and no plugin.
Shopify works on every plan, including the free trial. Connecting a store costs nothing extra.
What you get
Once your store is connected, your store agent can:
- Answer catalog questions from your real products, variants, options, and prices
- Read stock and price from your synced catalog, kept current by webhooks so it isn’t offering what you just sold out of
- Recommend in-stock products rather than whatever it remembers
- Look up orders for shoppers who can prove the order is theirs
- Send order-status updates to shoppers who opt in, in the same chat
- Hand a ready-to-buy shopper to your Shopify checkout with their whole cart intact
Prerequisites
- A Shopify store you administer
- A Cuneiform Chat workspace, and an Owner or Admin account on it — connecting a store is an admin action
- At least one agent, or room in your plan to create one (see Your store agent)
Collaborator accounts can’t complete setup. Part of the setup happens in your Shopify admin’s Dev Dashboard, which Shopify does not offer to collaborator accounts. If an agency manages your store, the store owner — or a staff account with app permissions — has to do that part.
How connecting works
You create a small app inside your own Shopify admin, install it on your store, and paste its credentials into Cuneiform Chat. Your store’s data never leaves your Shopify account by any other route, and the app belongs to you rather than to us.
The step-by-step walkthrough lives in the product, where it can show you the exact values to enter for your store — those values depend on your workspace and on the API version we’re currently running, so a copy of them here would go stale without telling you.
To start: open Commerce → Shopify in Cuneiform Chat and follow the setup steps on the connect screen. It walks you through creating the app, requesting the permissions below, installing it, and pasting in the credentials.
Installing the app is its own step. In Shopify’s Dev Dashboard, releasing a version of your app is not the same as installing it on your store. If you stop at release, the credentials are rejected when you paste them in — the connect screen says so explicitly when that happens.
Permissions we ask for
Your app requests five read-only permissions. There is no write permission in the set — it cannot change anything in your store.
| Permission | Why we need it |
|---|---|
read_products | Read your catalog: products, variants, options, prices, images |
read_inventory | Read stock levels so the agent only recommends what’s available |
read_orders | Look up a shopper’s order and send them status updates |
read_fulfillments | Report shipping progress on those orders |
read_customers | Match a shopper’s phone number against the order they’re asking about |
Read-only means read-only. The app cannot create, edit, or delete products; cannot adjust inventory; cannot create, edit, or cancel orders; and cannot capture payments. Every purchase completes on your own Shopify checkout.
If a permission isn’t granted
Shopify restricts customer and order access on its cheapest plans, so a store on Basic or Starter may not be able to grant read_orders or read_customers. When that happens the connection still succeeds and Cuneiform Chat tells you which permissions are missing, on the connect screen and again on Commerce → Shopify → Connection for as long as the gap is real.
Anything that depends on a missing permission stays off rather than failing quietly — order lookup and order-status updates are the usual casualties. Once your store’s plan covers them, disconnect and reconnect the store so the new permissions are picked up.
Opening Cuneiform Chat inside your Shopify admin
Optionally, your app can be marked embedded, which makes your Cuneiform Chat dashboard open inside admin.shopify.com alongside the rest of your store admin — setup, connection status, configuration, and a dashboard. The connect screen gives you the two values Shopify asks for. Skipping this changes nothing about how the integration works; it only changes where you open it from.
One store per workspace
A workspace connects one Shopify store. It can also connect one WooCommerce store at the same time — see Commerce.
If you try to connect a store that’s already connected to a different workspace, the attempt is refused rather than silently taking it over.
Changing permissions or credentials later
There is no separate “Reconnect” button. Your app’s permissions and credentials are recorded when you connect and aren’t rewritten afterwards, so any change you make in Shopify — adding a scope, rotating the client secret — reaches Cuneiform Chat by disconnecting and reconnecting the store.
Reconnecting re-runs the teardown described under Disconnecting, so read that first if you have Storefronts scoped to the store.
After you connect
- Your catalog starts syncing immediately. See Catalog & Knowledge for what the sync covers and how it stays current.
- One agent becomes your store agent, chosen for you at connect. See Your store agent.
- Order-status updates are on by default, and the only gate belongs to the shopper: they opt in after verifying their order. See Orders.
Prices and your store’s currency
Prices sync as the amounts your store holds, in your store’s own currency — the one your Shopify store settings name. We read it from the store, never from the shopper, and shoppers see it as the three-letter code beside the amount: USD 19.99, EUR 19.99, BDT 1900.
A code rather than a symbol is deliberate. $ alone is the dollar of four different countries, and a confidently wrong symbol on a price is worse than an unmistakable code.
The currency is re-read on the nightly catalog reconcile, so if you change it in Shopify the quoted code follows within a day. Until that first nightly pass, a store connected before we started reading it quotes plain amounts with no code — the price is still correct, it just isn’t labelled yet.
Shopify Markets pricing is not reflected. If you sell into several markets with their own currencies, Shopify presents each shopper a local price on your storefront. We store one currency per store — your store’s own — so the agent quotes that same one to every shopper, wherever they are.
The amounts are still right in the currency they’re labelled with; they simply aren’t the market-converted figures the same shopper would see on your site. Checkout is unaffected: the shopper finishes on your Shopify checkout, which applies your market rules as usual.
Troubleshooting
The credentials were rejected
The most common cause is that the app was released but never installed on the store — those are two separate actions in Shopify’s Dev Dashboard. The connect screen distinguishes that case from a genuine credential mismatch, so read the message it gives you rather than assuming the Client ID and Secret are wrong.
Order lookup and shipping updates aren’t available
Check Commerce → Shopify → Connection for a missing-permission notice. On Shopify’s cheapest plans read_orders and read_customers may not be grantable at all — see If a permission isn’t granted.
The catalog is empty right after connecting
The first import backfills the whole catalog and takes a few minutes on a large store. If it still looks empty afterwards, run Re-sync now from Commerce → Shopify → Catalog & Data. While the catalog is still empty, the checklist on the Overview tab also offers a one-click Sync now.
The agent isn’t answering product questions
Check that you’re talking to the store agent — the one wired to the store at connect time. Its agent page shows a read-only panel saying it’s managed by your store. Other agents don’t carry the commerce tools.
A Member can’t connect the store
Connecting a store requires the Integration connect permission, which Owners and Admins have and Members don’t.
Disconnecting
Disconnect from Commerce → Shopify → Disconnect. Disconnecting:
- Removes the stored connection and the synced catalog
- Clears the product knowledge built from that catalog, so agents stop answering from it
- Resets the store agent’s commerce grant, reverts its commerce persona if you never edited it, and archives the agent itself — reconnecting the same store reclaims it with its tuning and version history intact
- Permanently deletes any Storefront scoped to that store, along with its analytics history. Storefronts you built by hand are untouched
- Archives the commerce Agent Forms that came with the store
- Deletes the AI quiz suggestions outright, so a future reconnect starts from a clean slate
If you still have a WooCommerce store connected, only the workspace-wide steps — archiving commerce Agent Forms and deleting quiz suggestions — are skipped. The Shopify store’s own catalog, product knowledge, Storefronts, analytics and store agent are always torn down.
Your app stays installed in your Shopify admin. Disconnecting here removes our side of the relationship, not the app you created — it belongs to your store. Delete it from your Shopify admin if you want it gone.
Related
- Commerce overview — what connecting a store gives you
- WooCommerce — the other supported platform
- Catalog & Knowledge — how the catalog syncs and stays fresh
- Orders — order lookup and status updates
- Checkout — handing a shopper off to buy