"Running a store from an AI chat: a free tool"

Before you read on: this tool works with Horoshop, an ecommerce platform used mostly in Ukraine and the CIS. If your store is on Shopify or WooCommerce, there is nothing for you to install today. The rest of this post is still worth ten minutes, though — the pattern it describes is coming to every platform, and the part about credentials and read-only mode applies to any tool that connects an AI assistant to a live store.

Once a week I do the same thing: open the admin panel, filter orders, export the catalog to a spreadsheet, fix two hundred prices, upload it back, then set statuses one by one and paste in tracking numbers. The work is not difficult — there is just a lot of it, and it is identical in every store.

So I wrote a tool that lets you ask for all of that in plain language, in a chat with an AI assistant. It is open source, free, and runs on your own machine. Below: what it can really do, what it cannot, and why the first run should be read-only.

What I do by hand every week

To make it clear which hours we are talking about, here is a typical week in a store with a few thousand products:

• see which orders have been stuck in processing for more than two days;
• export a section's products to find the ones with an empty description;
• update prices on a batch of SKUs before a promotion;
• set shipping statuses and add tracking numbers;
• count how many new customers registered in a month;
• check whether any hidden products still have stock against them.

Each item on its own is five to twenty minutes. Together it is several hours, and not one of them makes the store better: this is maintenance, not development.

What changes when the store answers questions

The same list, as sentences in a chat. These are not "how it could be" examples — this is what the tool does today:

• "Show me last week's orders that are still being processed";
• "Mark these 12 orders as shipped and add the tracking numbers";
• "Which products in Accessories have no search description?";
• "Update prices on these 200 SKUs — and show me the ones that failed";
• "Find hidden products that still have stock against them";
• "How many customers registered in August, and how many opted into email?";
• "Where did last month's orders come from — ads, email or search?";
• "Build a bundle from these three products at 15% off".

The last two deserve attention. The referral source is stored on the order itself, so the assistant can group revenue by channel without touching analytics at all. And bundles usually go unbuilt precisely because doing it by hand takes so long.

How it actually works

Three parts, and none of them is a service of mine.

First, your AI assistant: Claude, Cursor, or any other that can connect external tools. Second, a small program installed on your computer. Third, the official integration interface the platform provides to everyone — the same one CRMs and accounting systems use.

The assistant asks the program, the program asks your store, the answer comes back into the chat. Nothing runs on my side: no server, no cloud, no registration. I do not even know that you are using it.

About credentials — honestly

There is a point here that has to be said plainly, not in small print after installation.

Horoshop has no separate integration keys. Any connection to the platform works through an administrator login and password — the same for every CRM and accounting system. The platform offers no other way.

What to do about it:

• create a separate administrator for the integration: Settings → Admins. Then access can be switched off in one move without locking you out, and the store log shows what that user specifically did;
• remember that the login and password sit in a configuration file in plain text — that file must never reach git;
• do not give those credentials to me or to anyone else. Only the program on your machine needs them.

Read-only mode — and why you should start there

The tool has a switch that leaves only read actions. It does not work by having the assistant refuse to change things — the write tools are simply not registered, meaning they do not exist in the list of available tools. You cannot ask for something that is not there.

This is not excessive caution. The most dangerous operation here is a bulk product update: it writes to the live store and cannot be undone. Worse, product images are replaced rather than added by default: a careless import wipes the gallery.

So the working order is this: a week in read-only mode first, while you watch how it answers simple questions. Then enable writes. And the first bulk update is always on one SKU, never on two hundred.

Installing it in ten minutes

Three technical paragraphs follow — if you are the owner, skip to the next heading and forward the link to whoever set up your site.

The fastest route is to ask the assistant itself. The repository holds an instruction file written for it rather than for a human: you paste one paragraph into the chat, the assistant reads the instructions, asks you for the store domain, login and password, writes the config into the right file for whichever client it is running in, leaves read-only mode on and verifies the connection. It writes the password into the config only — not into the chat and not into git.

By hand is not hard either: one block in the client's settings with the command npx -y horoshop-mcp and three variables — domain, login, password. Node.js 20 or newer is required. The exact block for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and Cline is in the repository README.

The text to paste into the chat, and all the details, are on the free tools page; the code is in the GitHub repository under the MIT licence.

What it does not do

The obligatory section, without which this would be an advert.

• It does not act on its own. It does only what you asked, and only while the chat is open. There are no schedules and no background jobs — that is a fundamentally different problem.
• It sees only the store. No analytics, no ad accounts, no CRM, no warehouse outside the platform.
• It does not replace the admin panel. Bulk and tedious things, yes. Fine-grained configuration, design, content, no.
• Horoshop only. There is nothing like it for Shopify or WooCommerce yet.
• Large catalogs come back in pages. The platform caps exports at five hundred products per call, so a catalog of several thousand is paged through rather than fetched in one request.
• Some functions need a recent platform version or the B2B module. On older stores they simply do not respond.
• Version 0.1.0. Published on 3 September 2026 — the first release. And honestly, nobody used it for long except me: that is one more reason to start read-only.

Who should not bother

• A catalog of twenty products — by hand is faster, and that is fine.
• Nobody on the team works with AI assistants daily. Then what you need first is an assistant, and only then tools for it.
• You are waiting for a button inside the store admin. There will not be one: Horoshop has no app store, and a third-party button cannot be added.
• You need a process to run without a person, on a schedule. That is automation setup, not a free tool.

Where to start today

1. Create a separate administrator in the store — five minutes in the Admins section.
2. Install the tool in read-only mode by pasting one paragraph into your chat.
3. Ask it three questions about your own catalog that you currently answer by hand. If the answers match what the admin panel shows, you can carry on.