Shopify Catalog Audit

Shopify Catalog Audit

Finding the problems, not fixing them. This is the FIND stage of catalog work: it produces a ranked, justified list of product-data defects and hands them off. The FIX stage lives in sibling skills: shopify-catalog-cleanup (archiving/debris), shopify-seo-metadata (missing SEO meta), shopify-alt-text (missing image alt). Don't mutate here.

The core principle: on a catalog too large to eyeball, don't read every PDP. Build a cheap deterministic index over the whole catalog, let the model form justified hypotheses about where problems cluster, deep-read only that slice, then verify against the Admin API. The full method is in references/triage-method.md; the GraphQL recipes are in references/queries.md.

Store access

Read-only audit. Grant the minimum scope, read_products, and nothing else: this skill never needs a write scope, and a read-only token is the cheapest guarantee it can't damage the catalog.

Lane A: custom-app token (scriptable). In Shopify admin: Settings → Apps and sales channels → Develop apps → create an app → grant read_products, then install and copy the Admin API access token. Export it; never write it to a committed file:

export SHOPIFY_STORE="your-store.myshopify.com"
export SHOPIFY_ACCESS_TOKEN="<your Admin API access token>"   # env, not disk

curl -s "https://$SHOPIFY_STORE/admin/api/2025-07/graphql.json" \
  -H "X-Shopify-Access-Token: $SHOPIFY_ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"{ shop { name } }"}'

Lane B: Shopify CLI OAuth (no stored token). shopify store auth --store $SHOPIFY_STORE --scopes read_products then shopify store execute to run a validated read. Good for token-less stores where the owner logs in interactively.

Toolkit preflight. Lane B rides on the Shopify CLI: run shopify version first and install it if missing. For the full Admin GraphQL schema and validated execution, pair this skill with Shopify's official AI toolkit plugin. In Claude Code, check claude plugin list; if it isn't there:

claude plugin marketplace add Shopify/Shopify-AI-Toolkit
claude plugin install shopify-plugin@shopify-ai-toolkit

Recommended, not required: Lane A needs only curl and a token. The toolkit gives the agent the API; this skill gives it the audit playbook.

Non-destructive doctrine

This is a read-only skill; the doctrine is trivially satisfied but still governs how you verify.

• Never mutate. No productUpdate, no productDelete, no bulk write. If a finding needs fixing, name the sibling FIX skill and stop.
• Verify existence and state via the Admin API, not the sitemap. The sitemap (/sitemap_products_1.xml) lists published products only, and it silently misses drafts, archived items, and unpublished products, which are exactly where data debris hides. An audit that trusts the sitemap under-reports. Read product state back through admin/api/.../graphql.json.
• Ground truth beats self-grading. A finding is real when re-querying the Admin API confirms the defect on the live object, not when your index says so.

The audit loop

Two layers: a cheap deterministic index over the whole catalog, then hypothesis-driven triage on top of it. Never paste the whole catalog into the model "to be thorough": that's the cost trap this method avoids.

1. Build the cheap index. Paginate products and pull only the fields that reveal PDP quality (recipes in references/queries.md). Per product, compute deterministic flags in code (code answers what code can):

• Images: mediaCount / image count is 0 (missing photo) or 1 (thin, likely a placeholder for a product that should show several angles).
• Description: descriptionHtml empty, or stripped length below a small threshold (e.g. under ~20 chars = effectively empty). Flag "thin", don't judge quality yet.
• Pricing anomalies: any variant price of 0.00; any variant where compareAtPrice is set but ≤ price (an inverted or fake "sale" that shows no discount or a negative one).
• Taxonomy gaps: empty productType or empty vendor: these break filtered collections, faceted search, and Google Shopping feeds.
• Status context: carry status (ACTIVE/DRAFT/ARCHIVED) and publishedAt so a flag can be weighed (a $0 draft is noise; a $0 active published product is a live defect).

Emit a compact per-product row (handle, id, status, the boolean flags). That table, not the raw catalog, is the surface the model reasons over.

2. Hypothesize on the index, justified. The model reads the flag table and ranks where the real problems cluster, with a stated reason per hypothesis: no reason, drop it. Good hypotheses find patterns, not just rows: "every product from vendor X imported last month has 0 images, likely a broken feed import" beats "these 40 products lack images." Weight by live impact: an active, published product with a $0 price is a revenue leak; the same flag on a draft is noise.

3. Deep-read only the targeted slice. Pull full detail for just the products the justified hypotheses point at (their PDPs, variant tables, media). This is where the real tokens go. Never widen back to the whole catalog "to be safe" : that defeats the method.

4. Verify against ground truth. Re-query each surviving finding through the Admin API and confirm the defect on the live object. Not against the index, not against the sitemap. The passing real-world read is the evidence.

Discipline rails

• Justify-or-drop. A flag the model can't explain doesn't get deep-read.
• Log coverage. State what you indexed and what you did not. "Found 18 problem products" must never read as "the catalog is clean": you indexed for images, description, pricing, and taxonomy, so you are blind to everything else (broken variants, mismatched options, bad metafields). Name the blind spot explicitly; triage is not assurance.
• Re-aim, don't widen. Thin results mean a better index (flag a different signal), not feeding more raw catalog to the model.
• Rate limits are real. The products connection is query-cost throttled; read the cost-and-concurrency notes in references/queries.md before a full-catalog crawl.

Handoff format

Output a ranked list, grouped by defect class, each row: handle, product id, status, the specific flag(s), the justification, and the sibling FIX skill that owns the remedy. Missing/thin images → shopify-alt-text also applies once photos exist; missing SEO meta surfaced as a side effect → shopify-seo-metadata; archivable debris and $0 drafts → shopify-catalog-cleanup.

References

• references/queries.md: paginated products GraphQL recipes, the fields to pull for the index, query-cost / rate-limit notes, and a Plus-store concurrency note.
• references/triage-method.md: the hypothesis-driven triage method generalized for catalog work.

Provenance and maintenance

Last verified: 2026-07-05. GraphQL pinned to Admin API 2025-07; Shopify deprecates versions on a rolling quarterly schedule, so verify field names and the version against shopify.dev before trusting a version-specific claim. Read-only re-verification a stranger can run, confirming the token reaches the store and the audit fields resolve on the live schema:

curl -s "https://$SHOPIFY_STORE/admin/api/2025-07/graphql.json" \
  -H "X-Shopify-Access-Token: $SHOPIFY_ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"{ products(first:5){ edges{ node{ handle status productType vendor descriptionHtml mediaCount{count} variants(first:5){ edges{ node{ price compareAtPrice } } } } } } }"}'

Canonical docs: Admin GraphQL, the products query. This skill captures the audit method the docs don't; it is not a replacement for the reference.