Building an e-shop with an MCP connector for Art by Lucia
Paintings between dream and reality. Hand-painted canvases inspired by life, nature and dreams. Every piece is a unique original, hand-painted and signed in Slovakia. This is Art by Lucia. The artist behind this beautiful work is Lucia Nováková. Dreamlike landscapes, cherry blossoms, layers of silence. Each painting exists only once — an original with a signature, creation date and certificate of authenticity.
And every one of those paintings had to make it onto the e-shop. That meant filling in fourteen fields in the admin, none of which have anything to do with painting.
In brief
- Client: Art by Lucia
- Solution: E-shop development, MCP connector linked to the e-shop's CMS
- Connector rollout: about 16 hours of work
- Result: a new painting is added with a chat request instead of filling in several fields in the CMS
Who the client is
Art by Lucia is the brand of artist Lucia Nováková. Her paintings are built up from layers of acrylic, water, pastels and texture pastes — every canvas is a one-of-a-kind original.
We built the e-shop for her on our own CMS. Alongside the originals, it keeps growing with prints on canvas and paper and custom commissions.
Starting point
Lucia isn't a client who puts things off. She added paintings to the e-shop regularly.
The problem was elsewhere: how much time it took.
A painting's product page has a whole set of fields to fill in — name, artwork code, price, stock, category, short description, long description, URL, SEO title, meta description, keywords, main heading, image and its alt text, and so on.
None of it is hard. Realistically it takes around fifteen minutes per painting — if you know what you're writing and don't get stuck wording the description.
But with a series of paintings, it turns into a block of work during which the artist isn't thinking about paintings but about wording. And that's exactly the kind of task she can get rid of efficiently and simplify the whole process.
What we did
We built an MCP connector for the e-shop's CMS. The rollout, including design, implementation and testing, took about 16 hours of work.
The connector covers managing products, categories, the blog, reviews and points of sale. It works from both Claude and ChatGPT — it's one connector.
What it looks like in practice
Instead of a form, she writes a sentence:
Add a new painting. Title Miesto, kam odchádzajú sny, acrylic on canvas, 1,250 euros, category Original arts, one piece. Write the description in the style of the other paintings. Add a 5% discount and publish.
A product is created with its name, price, category, URL, description and SEO data filled in. Lucia checks the result and adds a photo.
Bulk work works too — for example, checking whether every painting has a meta description and adding the missing ones.
That's a task that would never get done in the admin. Not because it's hard, but because it's tedious and never the most important thing of the day.
What Lucia says
She recorded a short video herself describing our collaboration and working with the e-shop:
Watch the video on Instagram →
Who it makes sense for
Not for every e-shop. A connector pays off where the product range is alive — new items arrive, prices change, content gets added. Every minute in the admin is a minute taken from what the business actually does for a living.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to roll out an MCP connector?
For Art by Lucia it was about 16 hours of work, including scoping, implementation and testing. The time depends on how many operations the connector needs to cover and which system it connects to — with an e-shop on a custom CMS it's more straightforward than with a closed platform.
Does the client need to know how to code?
No. The connector is set up once and then used in an ordinary chat interface — just like writing a message to a colleague.
What if the AI makes a mistake?
Changes are immediately visible in the admin and can be fixed like any other edit. The connector deliberately has no irreversible operations — what isn't in it can't be done.
Is a connector worth it for a small e-shop?
It depends on whether the product range is growing. For a static e-shop with an unchanging offer, it's an unnecessary layer. But if the number of products keeps growing, rolling it out at ten items is cheaper and simpler than at a hundred — the data structure is still clear and there's nothing to migrate.
Does the connector work with both ChatGPT and Claude?
Yes. MCP is an open standard supported by both tools and others. The connector is written once and can be used anywhere MCP is supported.
Is your e-shop growing faster than your time to manage it?
We'll look at what you actually do in your business and tell you straight whether a connector is worth it.
