Connect Claude to Ship.com

Everything the assistant does runs through the same account rules, balances, and safety checks as the Ship.com website. And nothing that costs money happens without you seeing the price and saying yes.

Requirements

• A Ship.com account on a paid plan.
• Claude (claude.ai, Claude Desktop, or the Claude mobile app). Custom connectors are available on all Claude plans; on Free you can have one connector at a time. On Team and Enterprise plans, an organization owner may need to enable the connector for your workspace first.
• Nothing to install. The connector is hosted by Ship.com — there's no download, no local setup, and no API key to store in a file.

Some tools follow your plan's entitlements, exactly as the website does. Carrier pickups, batch label buying, business reports, and marketing email each require a plan that includes that feature; if your plan doesn't, the assistant will tell you plainly instead of failing quietly. See What you can do for the per-area breakdown.

You don't need Ship.com's AI add-on — connector access is included with every paid plan.

Connect from the Claude directory

This is the fastest path when Ship.com appears in Claude's connector directory.

1. In Claude, open Settings → Connectors and browse the directory.
2. Search for Ship.com and click Connect.
3. Sign in to your Ship.com account when prompted.
4. Read the approval screen. It lists exactly what you're granting — including, in plain language, that the assistant can be allowed to spend from your postage balance — then click Allow.
5. Ask Claude "what orders do I have ready to ship today?" to confirm it's working.

Don't see Ship.com in the directory? Use the manual steps below — they give you the same connection and the same tools.

Connect manually as a custom connector

Works on any Claude plan, and doesn't depend on a directory listing.

1. In Claude, open Settings → Connectors and choose Add custom connector.
2. For the server URL, enter:

   https://app.ship.com/mcp

3. Open the advanced settings and enter the client ID:

   claude

   Leave the client secret blank — there isn't one.
4. Click Connect. Claude sends you to Ship.com to sign in.
5. On the Ship.com approval page, review what you're granting and click Allow. You'll land back in Claude with the connector active.

The connector speaks streamable HTTP over HTTPS and signs you in with OAuth 2.1 (authorization code with PKCE), so your Ship.com password is never shared with Claude and each connected app gets its own credentials you can revoke on its own.

Other AI tools: Claude Code, IDEs, and automation platforms

The same server works with any tool that accepts an access token in a request header — Claude Code, the Claude API, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, JetBrains AI tools, and workflow platforms such as n8n and Zapier.

1. In Ship.com, go to Settings → API Integration and copy your access code.
2. Point your tool at https://app.ship.com/mcp with the header Authorization: Bearer <your access code>.

For Claude Code, that's one command:

claude mcp add --transport http shipcom https://app.ship.com/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer <your access code>"

Access codes are valid for 180 days. Treat one like a password: it's tied to your account, and anyone holding it can act as you.

What you can do

Ask in your own words — you don't need to know tool names. Here's what the connector covers.

Orders

Read your orders, create new ones, and pull orders in from your sales channels. Orders can be built from anywhere — a spreadsheet, an email, a marketplace Ship.com doesn't connect to natively — complete with line items, and up to 100 at a time in one request. Re-sending the same order won't create a duplicate.

• "What orders do I have ready to ship today?"
• "Create an order for Jane Miller: two candles at $18 each, shipping to 123 Main St, Austin TX 78701."
• "Sync new orders from my Shopify store, then tell me when it's done."

Rates and labels

Quote a rate for any package, rate a real order across carriers, buy the label, and void one if you need to.

• "What would it cost to send a 12 oz package to 07726?"
• "Price the options for order 12345 and show me the cheapest."
• "Buy the Ground Advantage label for order 12345 — nothing over $8."

Carrier messages come through word for word. If one carrier errors while another prices successfully, you'll see the priced options plus the carrier's own explanation. If an address won't validate, the assistant refuses to buy rather than shipping to a bad address.

Pickups

Check whether a carrier can come, book the pickup, and see what's already scheduled.

• "Can USPS pick up tomorrow?"
• "Schedule a pickup for tomorrow — packages are on the front porch."
• "What pickups do I have coming up?"

Scheduling sweeps every package you have currently eligible for pickup, so the assistant tells you how many are included before it books. UPS On-Call pickups are booked and canceled on the Ship.com website only — the assistant will point you there rather than touch a paid pickup.

Customers

Look up a customer's history, add or update one, and find the customers who've gone quiet.

• "Has Jane Miller ordered from me before?"
• "Which customers haven't bought anything in 90 days?"
• "Update Jane's shipping address to 55 Oak Ave, Apt 4."

Tracking

Check where a shipment is and pull the label or tracking number back up.

• "Where's order 12345?"
• "Show me everything that's still in transit."
• "Give me the tracking number and label for order 12345."

Tracking comes from your account's own records, which Ship.com keeps current from the carrier — so it's fast and it matches what the website shows you.

Reports and analytics

Pull your shipping spend, your sales tax, and a breakdown of volume, carrier mix, and top destinations.

• "How much have I spent on shipping this year?"
• "What did I pay in sales tax last year?"
• "Show me my shipping volume and carrier mix for the last 90 days."

Batch shipping

Price everything you have ready to ship in one pass, buy it all after you approve, and check on progress.

• "Price out everything I have ready to ship and show me the total."
• "Yes, buy all of those."
• "How's that batch going? Did anything fail?"

Batches run in the background, so the assistant hands you back a batch to check on rather than making you wait. If individual orders fail, you get the reason for each one.

Email

Send one customer a note tied to their order, or run a campaign to a segment of your list.

• "Email Jane a thank-you note about her order."
• "How many customers haven't ordered in 60 days?"
• "Draft a note to that group and show me the recipient count before sending."

Marketing email always previews the exact recipient count and subject line before anything goes out, and your plan's monthly email allowance applies just as it does on the website.

Address checks

Validate a US address against USPS before you print.

• "Is 123 Main St, Austin TX 78701 a valid address?"
• "Check the address on order 12345 before I buy the label."

Address checking is US-only. A "not valid" answer means USPS didn't confirm the address — occasionally that's a USPS outage rather than a bad address, so the assistant says so and suggests retrying with an address you know is good.

Account

Check your postage balance, your plan, and your referral credit — and connect a UPS account.

• "What's my postage balance?"
• "What plan am I on?"
• "Do I have any referral credit I can use?"

Connecting UPS means accepting the UPS Technology Agreement, which is a binding contract. The assistant has to show you the full agreement text and get your explicit acceptance before it can complete that step — it can't accept on your behalf.

Safety and money

Reading is instant. Spending never is. Every tool is one of two kinds:

• Read-only tools — checking orders, quoting rates, looking up customers, pulling reports — run immediately. They're labeled read-only for Claude, so your assistant knows they're safe to use while it works something out with you.
• Action tools — anything that spends money, sends email, cancels, or changes existing records — run in two steps. The first call is a preview: it does nothing, and returns exactly what would happen. The action only executes when you explicitly confirm.

Every purchase shows the cost first. A label preview returns the rate you'd pay, any pay-as-you-go card fee, the total charge, your current postage balance, and what the balance would be afterward. Nothing is bought until you say yes. You can also set a price ceiling — ask for a label "under $8" and the assistant refuses anything above it rather than buying the next-cheapest option.

Charges go to your own Ship.com postage balance, the same balance the website draws from. If a purchase would take your balance negative, your account's existing auto-recharge settings apply exactly as they do on the site — and the preview tells you before you confirm.

The same guardrails as the website. Duplicate-purchase protection, fraud checks, and your plan's label limits all apply. Nothing about asking an AI instead of clicking a button changes what your account is allowed to do.

A couple of specifics worth knowing:

• Canceling a label queues your refund; the credit lands roughly two weeks later, the same as canceling on the website. The assistant will tell you it's queued, not refunded.
• Every action taken through the connector is recorded in your order history and marked as coming from a connected AI app, so you can always see what was done and how.

Privacy and data

The connection is HTTPS only, and every read and write is scoped to your own Ship.com account — the connector can't see or touch another seller's data. Your Ship.com password is never shared with Claude: signing in happens on Ship.com, and Claude receives a credential that only works for your account and that you can revoke at any time. Access credentials are stored hashed, never in plain text, and access tokens are short-lived and refreshed automatically behind the scenes. Ship.com keeps an operational log of connector activity — which tool ran, when, how long it took, and whether it succeeded — to support the service and investigate failures; error detail is retained for 90 days. Full details are in the Ship.com Privacy Policy.

Disconnecting

You can cut the connection from either side, and you don't need to do both.

In Claude: open Settings → Connectors, find Ship.com, and remove or disconnect it.

In Ship.com: go to Settings → API Integration. Under Connected apps, click Disconnect next to the app you want to cut off. Each connected app is revoked on its own, so disconnecting Claude leaves your other integrations working. If you connected a tool by pasting an access code, generate a new API key on that same page — the old code stops working immediately.

Troubleshooting

"Your account isn't enabled for this connector yet." Access is rolling out in stages. If you hit this, email help@ship.com with the email on your Ship.com account and we'll sort out access.

"That isn't available on your plan." Carrier pickups, batch buying, business reports, and marketing email each need a plan that includes them, and some older legacy plans don't map to current features. The assistant names the feature it couldn't use — check your plan in Ship.com under Settings, or ask support which plan covers what you need.

The connector stopped working after a while. If you connected through Claude, disconnect and reconnect — that's the quickest fix. If you connected a tool by pasting an access code, codes expire after 180 days, and generating a new API key in Ship.com invalidates the old one; copy the current code from Settings → API Integration and paste it in again.

"Too many requests" during a big job. The connector accepts 60 requests per minute per connection. That's plenty for conversation, but a loop over hundreds of orders can hit it. For large imports, ask the assistant to create orders in bulk — it can send up to 100 in a single request — and give a stalled job a minute before retrying.

A rate came back with a carrier error, but prices too. That's expected. Ship.com quotes several carriers at once and passes each one's response through unedited, so one carrier can fail while another prices normally. Use the priced options, or fix what the failing carrier is complaining about — usually a package dimension or an address.

Support

Email help@ship.com. Include the email on your Ship.com account, the AI tool you're connecting from, and what you asked for when it went wrong — that's usually enough for us to find the exact call in our logs.