The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic, for connecting AI assistants to outside data and tools. An MCP server is the bridge. It tells an assistant what it can look up and what actions it can take, and it enforces the rules on every request.
For a commerce brand, that means an assistant can search your catalog, check stock, look up an order or start a cart using live data instead of whatever it scraped last month.
What a commerce MCP server can expose
- Catalog search. Products, variants, specs and availability, filtered and ranked by your rules.
- Inventory and pricing. Live stock and the right price for the right customer.
- Orders. Status, tracking and history for authenticated customers.
- Cart actions. Building and updating a cart that hands off to checkout.
- Internal tools. Staff-only actions for support or merchandising teams.
Built for production
We design the tools, authentication and rate limits, then host and monitor the server alongside your stack, often on Vercel. Public tools stay read-only by default, and anything that changes data needs the right permissions. Some platforms, including Shopify Plus, offer their own MCP endpoints, and we extend them where they fall short.
See how MCP compares with UCP and ACP in UCP, ACP and MCP explained.