I Open-Sourced My Agency's Shopify Playbooks for AI Agents

AI agents can run your Shopify store now. Claude Code, plugged into the Admin API, will happily archive products, rewrite descriptions, and delete metafields at catalog scale. That's the good news and the bad news.

Shopify's official AI toolkit gives your agent the API: every query, every mutation, full schema reference. What it can't give your agent is judgment. Which taxonomy ID not to guess. Why a blank cell in a Matrixify import silently deletes a metafield. How to backfill SEO metadata without clobbering copy a human wrote on purpose. That knowledge only comes from doing the work on real stores, and occasionally getting burned.

We've been doing that work at Ethercycle since 2014. So I wrote it down.

Awesome Ecom Skills is a free, MIT-licensed collection of nine agent skills: plain-markdown playbooks your AI agent loads on demand and runs against a live store. No app to install, no code that phones home. Each one is distilled from real client engagements, with the numbers left in.

The core is a catalog cleanup suite, six skills that take a messy catalog from "find the problems" to "fix the data":

• Catalog audit: find missing photos, thin descriptions, and pricing anomalies in a catalog too big to read whole
• Category taxonomy: assign Shopify's Standard Product Taxonomy and fill category metafields, verified against the source instead of guessed
• Catalog cleanup: bulk-archive dead products, delete the orphaned metafields behind ghost review stars, strip HTML debris from descriptions
• SEO metadata: backfill missing SEO titles and descriptions without overwriting existing copy
• Alt text: backfill image alt text across product media and the Files library
• Matrixify: bulk imports and exports without the traps that eat data

Plus three more: redirect mapping (turn a Search Console 404 export into live 301s), JSON-LD structured data, and landing page ideation.

Every skill follows the same doctrine: preview before you mutate, fill missing only, back up before bulk edits, and verify every write against the API afterward. That's not marketing language. It's the difference between an agent that helps and an agent that quietly wrecks a live store while you're at lunch.

If you use Claude Code, install it as a plugin:

/plugin marketplace add kgelster/awesome-ecom-skills
/plugin install ecom@kgelster

On any other agent that supports skills, clone the repo and copy the skills folder in. They're markdown files. Read them first. You should read anything before handing it the keys to your store.

Get it here: github.com/kgelster/awesome-ecom-skills

It's free, it's open source, and if you've got a hard-won Shopify lesson of your own, pull requests are open.

-- Kurt Elster