How to connect your Shopify store to Spectersync

You want to edit your Shopify blog the way you’d run an editor across a whole archive — refresh every meta description, fix the internal links, rewrite a category in your voice — and have those edits land back on the live store. Before any of that happens, your store has to be connected. This guide walks the exact OAuth flow in the browser, what happens at each step, and what to do when you have more than one store.

What “connecting” actually means on Shopify

Shopify is hosted. Every store lives at your-store.myshopify.com, even when you’ve put a custom domain in front of it, and there’s no self-hosted variant to worry about. That makes the connection model simple: one OAuth flow per store, right in your browser. You don’t generate an API token by hand, you don’t paste a long-lived secret, and there’s no admin password ever involved.

When you connect, Shopify hands Spectersync an access token scoped only to articles, blogs, and pages — the surface it actually operates on. Everything else in the store (orders, customers, products, inventory, payouts, themes, Liquid) stays invisible. The exact scopes are covered in what permissions Spectersync asks for on Shopify.

The connection flow, step by step

1. Enter your store handle

In the workspace, type your store handle into the connect field. The handle is the bit before .myshopify.com — if your store is at acme-coffee.myshopify.com, you type acme-coffee. You can also paste the full acme-coffee.myshopify.com address or even the URL of your admin; the form normalises whatever you give it.

If you have a custom domain (say acmecoffee.com), you still use the myshopify.com handle here — Shopify’s OAuth flow only recognises the canonical handle. You can find it in your Shopify admin under Settings → Domains; the .myshopify.com address is always listed even when you’ve put a custom one in front.

2. Approve Spectersync in Shopify

Hitting Connect Shopify store redirects you to Shopify’s standard install screen. This is Shopify’s own page, not ours. You’ll see:

• The app name (Spectersync) and developer
• The exact scopes being requested: read_content and write_content
• A plain-English summary that Spectersync will be able to read and write your blog posts, articles, blogs, and pages

Read it. If anything looks wrong (an unfamiliar scope, the wrong store at the top of the page), back out. If it looks right, hit Install app. Shopify mints the access token at this moment and redirects you back.

3. Your blog opens in the workspace

The redirect completes the handshake and your store’s content loads into the workspace: every article in every blog as clean, structured content — title, handle, blog assignment, author, tags, summary, status, and the SEO fields. Browsing and reviewing that content is free. Your workspace opens with 500 free credits; only AI runs spend them. From here you’re in normal territory — edit by hand or run a recipe across the archive, review the diff, publish back.

Reconnecting (when the handshake breaks)

If the connection ever ends up in a weird state — token revoked, scopes changed, store renamed — the fix is to uninstall and reconnect.

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Settings → Apps and sales channels, find Spectersync, and click Uninstall. That immediately invalidates the access token on Shopify’s side.
2. In the workspace, remove the store from your connections.
3. Run the connect flow again.

This is also what to do if you ever suspect a token has been exposed. There’s no “rotate token” button — uninstall and reconnect is the rotation. If the handshake fails partway through, the connection-failed troubleshooting guide walks the common causes.

Connecting multiple stores

Plenty of operators run more than one Shopify store — a flagship and a sub-brand, a wholesale storefront, a staging shop. Spectersync handles this by treating each store as a separate connection with its own access token.

To add a second store, run the connect flow again and enter the second store’s handle; Shopify will ask you to log into whichever account owns it. Each connection stays its own space in the workspace, so handles from different stores never collide.

What you’ve actually given Spectersync

It’s worth being explicit, because Shopify’s install screen flashes past quickly. You’ve given Spectersync:

• Read and write access to articles, blogs, and pages on this one store
• An access token managed for this connection

You have not given it access to orders, customers, products, inventory, payouts, themes, Liquid templates, or any other surface. That’s not policy on our side — it’s enforced by Shopify, because those scopes were never requested. The full breakdown is in what permissions Spectersync asks for on Shopify.

Once you’re connected, the rest of the workflow — bulk SEO sweeps, meta-description passes, CTA inserts — runs the same way across your whole archive. Subscribe now →

Prefer to run the engine on your own Mac?

If you’d rather connect via the desktop app — the same OAuth flow, but pulling every article down to a folder of plain .md files with nothing routed through our servers and the token in your macOS Keychain — that’s the desktop and open-source edition, which walks the Mac-app handshake and the local sync folder in full.