Manage your Etsy shop's Pinterest from Claude or ChatGPT

Most of the work of running Pinterest for an Etsy shop is small decisions repeated many times: which listing next, what to call it, which board, approve or skip, is that ad worth it. Those are exactly the kind of decisions that are easier to make by asking than by clicking through screens. So Pinforge has a connector for AI assistants: you can manage your pins, and on Growth and Pro your ads, from inside Claude or ChatGPT.

This post covers how to add it, what it's good at, and what it will never do without asking you.

What the connector is

The connector is an MCP server. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI apps use tools from other services. When you add Pinforge, your assistant can call a small set of Pinforge tools on your behalf: list your listings, suggest pin text, draft pins, show your queue, approve or skip pins, suggest boards, and work with ad campaigns.

It only ever sees your own Pinforge account, and it can only do what your plan allows. It signs in the same way you do: the first time, you sign in to Pinforge in your browser and press Allow. You can remove its access at any time from Settings → AI assistants.

How to add it

The address is the same for every app: https://pinforge.io/mcp.

Claude: open Settings → Connectors, choose Add custom connector, name it Pinforge and paste the address. Press Connect, sign in to Pinforge and press Allow. Then turn the connector on from the tools menu in a chat.

ChatGPT: turn on Developer mode (Settings → Apps & Connectors → Advanced settings, on plans that offer custom connectors), then create a connector with the same address and OAuth sign-in. Add it to a chat from the + menu.

Menu names change from time to time; our setup page keeps the current steps.

Things to ask

A few that work well:

• "Draft pins for my five most-favourited rings." Pinforge picks those listings, writes keyword-led titles and descriptions from each listing's own details, makes the tall pin images and schedules them in your next free slots. They wait as drafts unless you've turned on auto-approve.
• "Which board should each of these go on?" You get the best one to three of your existing boards for each listing, with a one-line reason ("matches 'antler' and 'ring' in the title"). When nothing fits, it suggests new boards named the way buyers search, built from your own listing tags.
• "What's in my queue this week? Approve the ones about ravens." It lists what's waiting and approves exactly the pins you name.
• "How are my pins doing?" Pins used against your plan this month, and Pinterest's own numbers (people who saw them, saves, clicks to your shop) once they've arrived.
• "What would a $5 a day ad for these three products look like?" You get a plan, not a campaign: the countries it would target (where your shop ships and Pinterest runs ads), the monthly cost at that budget, whether it fits your plan, and a suggested return target worked out from your margin.

What it will never do without you

AI assistants are good at drafting and bad at knowing when to stop, so the rules are built into the tools themselves, not left to the assistant's judgement:

• Pins: drafts wait for your approval (unless you've switched on auto-approve in Pinforge). Approving only happens for pins you ask it to approve.
• Money: anything that creates an ad, turns one on or raises a budget needs an explicit confirmation step. Your assistant has to show you what will change and get a yes first.
• Paused by default: new ad campaigns are created paused. Nothing spends until you turn one on.
• Limits: budgets can't go past your plan's monthly ad spend limit, and Pinforge never raises a budget on its own. Ad spend is billed by Pinterest to your own ad account.
• Boards: creating a board on your Pinterest account also needs a confirmation.

Every call is rate-limited and logged, and you can disconnect an assistant from Settings whenever you like.

When to use it, and when not to

The connector is handy for quick batches ("draft a week of pins for the new collection"), for thinking out loud about ads, and for checking in without opening another tab. For looking through pin images one by one, the Pins page is still faster: you can see every image and edit in place.

If you haven't started with Pinterest yet, begin with how to get Etsy sales from Pinterest and how often to pin. The connector is included on every Pinforge plan.