Open an online store with your AI agent

You can create an online store using AI. Your AI agent can do almost everything you can do in the dashboard: add products, set shipping rates, write pages and pick a theme. You stay in charge of the two things that matter most: your payments and the moment your store opens.

This guide shows the whole path, from a new key to an open store.

Before you start

You need three things:

• A Formahand store. The Free plan is enough; see pricing.
• An agent that speaks MCP, the open protocol agents use to call tools. Claude Code and Codex both do, and so do many other clients.
• A few sentences about your shop: what you sell, where you ship, and roughly what things cost.

If you would rather try everything first, turn on your test store. It is a separate copy with test payments, and email from it goes only to you. A test key only ever reaches the test store. Live and test environments explains it.

Step 1: make a key for your agent

Your agent signs in with a key, called a token, that only reaches your store.

1. Open Settings → Agents & API in the dashboard.
2. Open Tokens and press Create token.
3. Give it a name you will recognise later, such as the agent's name.
4. Choose what it may do. To set up a whole store, an agent needs to write products, settings and the storefront, and to publish the storefront.
5. Copy the key. It is shown once.

Publishing is its own permission. A key without it can change your draft but never what shoppers see. You can revoke a key at any time, and it stops working at once.

If you are still in the setup steps of a new store, Use my own agent does this for you: it makes a key named "Store setup agent" and shows it once, with the lines to paste into your agent.

Step 2: connect the agent

Every agent connects to the same address: https://formahand.com/mcp, with your key in an Authorization: Bearer header.

For Claude Code, run this once in a terminal, with your key in place of <token>:

claude mcp add formahand --transport http https://formahand.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer <token>"

Settings → Agents & API → Connect an agent has the same line ready to copy. The setup steps also offer Open in Claude Code, Open in Codex and a button that copies the prompt, so your agent starts with a first prompt already written. The two open buttons work only where that app is installed; the copy button works everywhere.

Step 3: tell it about your shop

Write to your agent the way you would brief a person. For example: "Set up my store. I sell hand-thrown mugs and bowls, I ship to the US and Canada, and I want a calm, minimal look."

A well-behaved agent starts with two calls. describe_system gives it the working guide to Formahand, and get_started gives it your store's checklist and the next steps in order. You do not need to name tools yourself.

For a new store the agent usually works in this order:

1. Shipping: the countries you ship to and your rates, with set_shipping.
2. Products: each product with upsert_product, then its photos with set_product_image.
3. Collections that group your products, with upsert_collection.
4. Search words for the store and for each product, with set_seo.
5. A theme and your own words on the home page, in the storefront draft.

Ask it to tell you what it did after each part. Every change it makes is recorded in your store's event log, with the key that made it.

Step 4: review the draft, then publish

The look of your store, its theme, sections, menus and home page words, lands in a draft. Nothing a shopper sees changes until someone publishes.

1. Ask the agent for a summary of the draft, or open Online Store → Storefront to see it yourself.
2. Ask for changes in plain words until you like it.
3. Publish, or ask the agent to call publish_storefront.

Other changes do not wait for a publish. Products, collections, prices, shipping, SEO words and redirects change your store the moment the agent saves them. If you want to try those first, use the test store.

Step 5: the steps that stay with you

Two things are yours to finish.

Payments. An agent can check whether payments are ready, but it cannot finish them. You finish payouts in Payments, on a form inside the dashboard itself, with no other site to sign in to. Payments has the details.

Opening the store. A new store starts closed, so nothing sells by accident. When everything is ready, open it from Home with Open store, or ask your agent to check describe_readiness and then call set_launch_mode. Your agent will tell you what is still missing if it is not ready.

Keep your agent close

Your agent is not only for day one. Dashboard pages carry an Ask your agent button with tasks for that page, such as Start a blog or Set up automatic discounts, and a prompt you can edit before you hand it to your agent.

Good next steps:

• Set up SEO for a new store, so people can find what your agent built.
• Move your store from another platform, if you already sell somewhere else.
• Agents and API, the full list of tools and permissions.