How to Connect Amazon Seller Central to Claude

Connecting Claude to Amazon does not mean handing Claude your Seller Central login. This route gives it no password, no session in your browser and no ability to click anything inside Seller Central. What it can do is call tools on a server you have connected it to, and if that server holds an Amazon authorisation you granted, the answers it gives you are drawn from your real account data rather than from guesswork.

This guide covers exactly that: connecting Claude to the Rufusly MCP server, authorising your Amazon seller account, what the 18 tools can do afterwards, and, at least as importantly, the things a connected assistant still cannot do. Everything below is checked against the running implementation rather than a roadmap.

What connecting actually means

Connecting Amazon to Claude means giving Claude a set of tools it can call, not giving it access to your browser or your Seller Central login. The mechanism is the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for exposing tools to an AI assistant over an ordinary HTTP endpoint, and Rufusly runs its server at https://mcp.rufusly.ai, speaking JSON-RPC 2.0.

There are two separate links in the chain, and keeping them separate is the whole security argument. The first link joins Claude to Rufusly and is authenticated by a credential you can revoke. The second link joins Rufusly to Amazon and is authorised through Seller Central by you, using your own Amazon login. Claude never touches the second link, and Amazon never sees the first one.

What you need before you start

You need three things: a Rufusly account, an Amazon seller account you are able to authorise, and a Claude client that supports remote MCP servers. Every Rufusly plan includes the MCP server and all 18 tools, so there is no upgrade to buy before connecting.

The Amazon step is the one people skip, and it is worth reading twice. Rufusly connects to Amazon through the Selling Partner API, and that authorisation is granted from inside Seller Central, per region. Until it exists, roughly half the tools return an error rather than data, which is covered further down.

Method one: add Rufusly as a custom connector

The connector route is the shorter one and involves no configuration file. In Claude, open Settings, go to Connectors, choose to add a custom MCP server, and paste the Rufusly server URL: https://mcp.rufusly.ai/mcp. Claude registers itself with the server automatically and then sends you to a browser to authorise.

What happens next is an OAuth 2.1 authorisation code flow with PKCE, and Rufusly accepts only the S256 challenge method, so a client that cannot do PKCE properly is refused rather than quietly downgraded. You sign in to Rufusly if you are not already signed in, and land on a consent screen that names the client requesting access, shows the host you will be sent back to, and confirms which Rufusly account you are signed in as. The host is worth a glance: a client name is self-declared at registration and can claim to be anything, whereas the redirect host cannot.

Approving it issues an access token prefixed with mcpo_ and valid for 30 days, alongside a refresh token the client uses quietly in the background. The refresh chain has a hard ceiling of 90 days, after which you authorise again by hand. Rufusly publishes a single scope, mcp, which covers the tool surface. There is no scope for billing and none for changing your account settings, because no such tool exists.

Method two: an API key in the Claude Desktop config file

If you prefer a static credential, generate an API key and put it in the Claude Desktop configuration file. In Rufusly, open MCP in the sidebar, go to the Setup tab, click New API key, give it a name, and copy it. The key is shown once only, is prefixed with ruf_, and is stored by Rufusly as a SHA-256 hash, which is also why a lost key cannot be recovered and has to be replaced.

Then open or create the Claude Desktop configuration file, which on macOS lives at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json, and add a server entry under mcpServers carrying three pieces of information.

• A name for the server. Rufusly documents this as rufusly. It is a label, and it is what you will see in the client.
• The url. https://mcp.rufusly.ai/mcp
• An Authorization header. The value is the word Bearer, a space, then your key: Bearer ruf_your_key_here

Restart Claude Desktop afterwards. The configuration file is read at startup, so a running client will not pick up the change, which accounts for most reports of the tools not appearing. Once it restarts, the Rufusly tools show up in the tool picker.

Authorising your Amazon seller account

The Amazon side is a separate authorisation, granted in Seller Central rather than in Claude. From Rufusly Settings you start the connection, which sends you to the Amazon consent page on the Seller Central host for your region, for example sellercentral.amazon.co.uk for the UK or sellercentral.amazon.de for Germany. You approve it there with your own Amazon credentials, and Amazon sends the authorisation back to Rufusly.

Two details are easy to get wrong. The consent is regional, so a seller operating in several regions authorises more than once, and sending a US seller to a European consent host either fails or authorises against the wrong region. And the marketplace defaults to amazon.co.uk throughout Rufusly, so if your account is primarily amazon.com it is worth naming the marketplace in your question. Rufusly maps 18 Amazon marketplaces, including the UK, US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, India, Japan, Australia, Singapore, the UAE and Turkey.

The tokens Amazon returns are encrypted before they are stored, and they stay in Rufusly. They are not sent to Claude, they do not appear in a tool response, and disconnecting in Settings marks the connection inactive so that no tool can use it.

Worth being explicit about the other direction. Whatever a tool returns is sent to your Claude client and handled under your own agreement with Anthropic, not under Rufusly's. That covers listing content, sales and finance figures, and, for the review request tool, Amazon order IDs. No tool returns buyer names, email addresses or delivery addresses.

What Claude can do once connected

A connected Claude can read your Amazon account data and produce Rufusly content, across 18 tools. Ten of them read live Amazon data through the Selling Partner API and need the Amazon authorisation described above. The other eight work off your Rufusly data and content, and need no Amazon connection at all.

The live Amazon tools cover listing content for an ASIN, sales performance, listing status and suppression issues, Brand Analytics search terms, the Search Query Performance report, a finance summary broken down by fee type, Amazon's own summarised customer review topics, FBA reimbursements owed to you, keyword intelligence ranked by purchase share, and Amazon review requests for eligible orders. Several of the Brand Analytics tools require Brand Registry on the Amazon side, which is Amazon's rule rather than Rufusly's, and some reports are cached or take a couple of minutes to build.

The tools that need no Amazon connection cover rewriting a listing from copy you supply, rewriting up to ten listings in one batch, Listing Quality Scores and what to fix, previous versions of a listing with their scores, a structured A+ content brief including exact module dimensions, saving an image from a URL into your creative library, drafting an Amazon Seller Support case with the right subject, body and case URL, and an Image Studio entry point.

In practice this means asking in one place what would otherwise take four tabs. Which of my search terms convert rather than merely getting clicks. What Amazon owes me in FBA reimbursements over the last 90 days. Why this ASIN is suppressed. Then, in the same conversation, asking for a rewrite that reflects the answer, which is the part that makes the connection worth having rather than merely clever.

What Claude cannot do, and why that is the point

A connected assistant can do exactly what the tools do, and nothing else. That boundary is not a limitation to work around, it is what makes the connection safe to grant, so it is worth being precise about.

• It cannot browse Seller Central. There is no session, no page reading and no clicking. If a number is not returned by a tool, Claude cannot go and look it up.
• It cannot edit or publish a live listing. No tool writes to your Amazon listing. Rewrites are produced and stored in Rufusly for you to review and publish yourself.
• It cannot send review requests unattended. The review request tool is a dry run by default: it returns the eligible orders and sends nothing until it is called again with explicit confirmation, because those emails reach real buyers.
• It cannot see anything you have not authorised. Before the Amazon connection exists, every Amazon tool returns SP_API_REQUIRED. Afterwards it reads only what the Selling Partner API returns for your own account.
• It cannot reach billing or your account settings. There is no tool for either, so the single mcp scope has nothing to grant.
• It cannot run without limit. Requests are rate limited to 60 per minute per account, and every listing rewrite spends a listing credit.

One honest caveat on image generation. The image tool currently checks that you have an image credit and then hands back a link into Image Studio rather than generating from the conversation, so treat it as a route into the tool rather than as generation inside Claude. Everything else in the list above runs end to end.

What it costs to run

Reading Amazon data through the MCP server costs no credits. A rewrite costs one listing credit, deducted from the same pool whether the request comes from Claude or from the web interface, and a batch of ten costs ten. The image tool spends nothing itself, because it hands you into Image Studio rather than generating in the conversation, and the image credit goes when you generate there.

Every plan includes every feature, including the MCP server and all 18 tools, and plans differ by the credits they include. Starter is 29 pounds a month, Growth is 79 pounds a month and Agency is 249 pounds a month, and there is a 149 pound one-time lifetime deal. No VAT is charged, because Rufusly is not VAT registered.

If the tools do not appear

The two most common causes are a client that was not restarted and a credential that is not being sent. Claude Desktop reads its configuration file at startup, so quit it fully and reopen it after editing the file, and check the Authorization header reads Bearer followed by a space and the whole key.

If the tools appear but every Amazon answer comes back as an error, read the error code rather than retrying. SP_API_REQUIRED means the Amazon authorisation is missing or has been disconnected, and is fixed in Settings rather than in Claude. INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS means the tool worked and your credit balance did not. A rate limit message means you have gone past 60 requests in a minute, which usually indicates a loop rather than a person typing.

If you are connecting from another MCP client instead, the same server URL and the same two authentication methods apply. And if what you want is better answers about your listings rather than a new integration, our guide to optimising for Amazon Rufus covers the shopper-facing half of the same problem.