# MCP for ecommerce: What to ask an AI assistant about your store > Connecting an AI assistant to your store is the easy part. Here are the questions worth asking first, which tool answers each one, and what the answers tell you about search, catalog, and feed health. The questions worth asking an AI assistant connected to your ecommerce data, and what the answers reveal ## Start by confirming what you are connected to The Hello Retail MCP server is how you connect an AI assistant to your store data. Once it is connected, the first questions worth asking are the ones that would otherwise take several dashboard reports. Which searches return nothing. Whether the last product feed synced. Which fields are searchable and sortable. What a template currently says. Each is answerable in one request. ## Four questions worth asking first It is worth doing even when you are confident the setup is correct. Most confusion in the first session comes from an assistant answering accurately about a site you did not mean. ## Which tool answers which question Read the list, then ask the follow-up that a dashboard makes awkward: are any of these products actually in the catalog already? That question crosses two tools, and it separates a merchandising gap from a findability problem. ## How to ask a question the assistant can answer well The first request should be to list the websites for your company. It is a small question that settles three things at once: the connection works, the assistant is looking at the right account, and you now have the site reference you will use in everything that follows. On the Hello Retail MCP server this needs a Company ID, found in my.helloretail.com under the profile icon and then Company Profile. ## What this is not for This guide is the practical companion to our explanation of how MCP servers and APIs differ. It assumes the connection is already made and covers what to do with it. ## Connect your store and ask Top searches tell you what the store is actually for, as opposed to what the navigation assumes it is for. When the most frequent queries do not match the categories in your main menu, the menu is the thing that is wrong. This is also the fastest read on seasonal shift, since the top of the list moves weeks before revenue does. ## Frequently asked questions ### What should I ask an AI assistant connected to my ecommerce store? Start with the questions you would otherwise have to open several dashboard reports to answer. Which searches return no results. Whether the last product feed synced. Which product and content fields are searchable and sortable. What a search or recommendation template currently says. These map directly onto the tool categories a connected assistant has available, so they are answerable in one request rather than a session of clicking. ### What is the first thing to do after connecting an MCP server? List the websites for your company. It confirms the connection works, it confirms the assistant is looking at the right account, and it returns the website you will refer to in every question afterwards. The Hello Retail setup guide suggests exactly this as a first request, using the Company ID found in my.helloretail.com under the profile icon and then Company Profile. ### Can an AI assistant change my search configuration? On the Hello Retail MCP server, yes, within limits. Most tools are read-only. The write-enabled ones, such as editing a search or recommendation template, ask for confirmation before they run, so a change is never made silently. In practice this means you can ask the assistant to draft a change, read what it proposes, and approve it as a separate step. ### Why do zero-result searches matter? Because the customer has told you what they wanted, in their own words, and got a blank page. The reason is either that you do not stock it, that you stock it under a different name than the one they used, or that the search engine has not learned that the two words mean the same thing. All three are fixable, and checking the list regularly is one of the cheapest sources of merchandising insight a store has. ### Do I need to know the tool names to ask a good question? No. The assistant reads the descriptions of the available tools when it connects and chooses which to call based on your question. Naming the website you mean and the period you care about matters far more than naming a tool, because those are the details the assistant cannot infer. ### How is this different from an analytics dashboard? A dashboard answers the questions it was designed to answer, in the shape its designer chose. An assistant with tool access can combine sources in response to a question nobody anticipated, such as asking whether the queries returning nothing correspond to products that are in the catalog but not indexed. The dashboard remains better for tracking a known number over time. --- For the full interactive experience, visit [helloretail.com/en/learn/mcp-ecommerce-questions](https://helloretail.com/en/learn/mcp-ecommerce-questions) ## About Hello Retail Hello Retail is an AI-powered ecommerce personalization platform based in Copenhagen, Denmark. We help online retailers improve search, recommendations, merchandising, email, and retail media through our proprietary Product Intelligence engine. - **Website**: [helloretail.com](https://helloretail.com) - **Demo**: [Book a Demo](https://helloretail.com/en/demo/) - **AI information**: [helloretail.com/en/ai-info](https://helloretail.com/en/ai-info) --- *This content is optimized for LLM consumption.*