Connecting Ordinary to Claude (MCP)

Ordinary connects to Claude through MCP (Model Context Protocol), so you can ask questions about your store in plain language and get answers from your Ordinary data. “What were net sales last month compared with last year?” or “Which Meta campaigns had the best ROAS in October?” are answered from the same numbers you see in Ordinary.

The connection is read-only. Claude can read your reports; it can’t change anything in Ordinary, Shopify or your ad accounts.

MCP access is included on every paid plan (Starter, Advanced and Enterprise).

How to connect

In Claude (claude.ai, the desktop app or mobile):

1. Open Settings → Connectors and choose Add custom connector.
2. Name it “Ordinary” and enter the URL https://app.tryordinary.com/api/mcp.
3. Click Connect and sign in with your Ordinary account when prompted.
4. Approve the read-only access request.

In Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http ordinary https://app.tryordinary.com/api/mcp

Then run /mcp inside Claude Code and choose Authenticate to sign in.

Claude is the supported client. Other AI tools that support remote MCP servers with sign-in may also work.

What you can ask about

• Sales — orders, gross sales, discounts, returns, net sales, taxes, shipping, duties and total sales, using the same definitions as Shopify’s Sales report. Split by shipping country or new vs returning customers, by day, week or month, and compared with the previous period or the same period last year.
• Store overview — order revenue, orders placed and average order value, matching the Overview chart.
• Channel attribution — revenue and orders Ordinary credits to each marketing channel, under the attribution model you choose. See Attribution models.
• Meta ads — spend, impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, CPM, Meta-reported purchases and ROAS, and Ordinary-attributed revenue and ROAS, for the whole account or by campaign.
• Orders, products, customers and A/B tests — look up an order, browse your catalog, find top customers, and read experiment results.

Each answer comes with the definition of every number and any caveats, such as a date range your plan doesn’t cover or results Meta may still revise. Claude is told to rely on those definitions rather than guess.

Which stores Claude can see

Claude can query every Ordinary organization you’re a member of whose plan includes MCP access. If you belong to several stores, Claude asks which one you mean or lists them for you.

Your plan’s date limits apply exactly as they do in the app.

Privacy

• Claude only sees what it asks for while answering your questions; nothing is sent to Claude in the background.
• Customer email addresses and phone numbers are masked. Order tags, customer tags and refund notes are not shared.
• Customer names and individual order details are shared when you ask about specific orders or customers.
• Ordinary keeps a record of which reports were read through the connection, by whom and when (not the answers themselves).

Disconnecting

• To stop Claude reading your data, remove the Ordinary connector in Claude (Settings → Connectors) or run claude mcp remove ordinary in Claude Code.
• Removing someone from your Ordinary organization ends their Claude access to that store on their next request.
• Downgrading to the Free plan turns MCP access off for that store.

Troubleshooting

• “MCP access isn’t included in this plan” — the store is on the Free plan. Upgrade from Settings → Billing.
• “Organization not found or not accessible” — you aren’t a member of that store, or the name was mistyped. Ask Claude to list the stores you can query.
• A number doesn’t match what you expected — ask Claude to show the definition and caveats it received. Sales figures follow Shopify’s Sales report (returns count on the day of the refund); store overview figures are order totals before refunds; attributed figures only include orders Ordinary could link to a visit or ad click.