Audit & launch of the Haute Fidélité Shopify store

<em>This entry combines three Shopify HF sessions from early May 2026 (email/shipping/branding config + audit/analytics/MCP + catalog audit/cleanup) on the same store.</em>

Context

The HF Shopify store (store.hautefidelite-hifi.com) existed but had never been audited or finalized (branding, emails, legal pages, settings). After the first sale, I ran a full session to make sure all the infrastructure was in place and professional before scaling up: switching shipping to GLS via Sendcloud, authenticating the email domain, and customizing the templates to reflect HF's premium identity.

What was built

• Shopify MCP connection up and running (products, collections, orders, analytics from Claude)
• Sendcloud rule "HF — GLS France Delivery", Chronopost → GLS switch
• Email DNS authentication (6 Ionos CNAMEs, DKIM, authenticated status); sender service-client@hautefidelite-magazine.com
• Email branding (HF red logo, Gill Sans, #EA5046) + 4 custom templates with editorial footer (order confirmation/shipping, invoice, abandoned cart)
• Audit of 30+ products (~27 without images, copy-paste descriptions, sparse tags, HF278 duplicate, negative stock) and 7 nearly empty collections
• 6-month analytics audit: revenue ~€10,279, conversion rate 0% (broken tracking)
• Verification of legal pages (FR/EN), payments (Shop Pay, card, Apple Pay, PayPal) and shipping (3 zones, 3 markets)
• Structured brief sent to Bertrand with a recap and prioritized actions

What was hard / unexpected

• Apostrophe encoding (curly vs. straight) prevents Ctrl+F from finding strings to replace
• The Shopify GraphQL API doesn't expose notification templates — everything is done manually in the admin
• GraphQL queries consume a huge number of tokens and saturated the context (SEO/metafields exploration deferred)
• The MCP add-to-collection tool requires approval on every call → better alternative: smart collection in admin

Stack

Shopify Admin API (GraphQL via MCP), Shopify Payments, Sendcloud + GLS, Ionos DNS (6 CNAMEs), Qonto, Liquid (email templates), Gill Sans, accent color #EA5046.

What this illustrates

Claude as a co-pilot for e-commerce auditing and launch — programmatic scan of an entire store via the API, then screen-by-screen guidance through the visual configuration in iterative mode. The combination of MCP Shopify + visual dialogue covers technical diagnosis and operational execution (down to email subject copywriting) in a single session.

Still to do

• Upload images for the ~27 products without covers, rewrite unique SEO descriptions, enrich tags
• Harmonise vendors/product types, add SKUs, link to the right collections (smart collection HF 233–280)
• Diagnose the 0% conversion rate (tracking), run variant harmonization and final audit prompts
• SEO audit of the 5 key products, confirm color #EA5046, prepare first email campaigns