Connecting ShipWave to Claude Desktop and Cursor

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI agents talk to external tools. ShipWave ships a full MCP server, so any MCP-compatible client — Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Zed, and others — can use ShipWave's tools the same way Ask ShipWave does. This means you can ask Claude in your editor to "create a return label for order #12345" and it will hit the same audited endpoints.

ShipWave's MCP server runs over HTTP with Server-Sent Events at https://shipwave.app/api/mcp/sse.

If your client speaks HTTP MCP natively — Cursor, Claude.ai custom integrations, and most current clients do — point it at that URL with an Authorization: Bearer header and you are done. There is nothing to install.

If your client only speaks stdio, as Claude Desktop does, you need a small local bridge that forwards JSON-RPC frames over HTTPS. ShipWave ships one at mcp-servers/shipwave-stdio in the ShipWave repository, published under the package name @shipwave/mcp-stdio. It is not on the public npm registry yet, so install it from source rather than with npx: clone or download the directory, run npm install and then npm link inside it, which puts a shipwave-mcp binary on your PATH. If you would like it on npm, tell support and we will prioritise it.

Go to Admin → Settings → API Keys and click Create key. Give it a descriptive name (e.g. "Claude Desktop on Eric's laptop") and pick scopes. For a typical agent setup, read:orders, read:shipments, read:inventory, write:labels, and write:returns cover the common operations without granting full write access. See API scopes explained for the full list.

Claude Desktop uses the stdio transport, so install the bridge first as described above. Then open Claude Desktop's settings file (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS) and add:

{ "mcpServers": { "shipwave": { "command": "shipwave-mcp", "env": { "SHIPWAVE_API_KEY": "sw_live_..." } } } }

You can also put the key in ~/.config/shipwave/mcp.env as SHIPWAVE_API_KEY=sw_live_... instead of inlining it. Restart Claude Desktop. You should see a hammer icon in the chat input indicating MCP tools are loaded. Type "what can ShipWave do?" to see the tool list.

Cursor speaks HTTP and SSE natively, so it needs no local bridge at all. Open Settings → Features → MCP → Add new MCP server and add:

{ "mcpServers": { "shipwave": { "url": "https://shipwave.app/api/mcp/sse", "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer sw_live_..." } } } }

Hit save. Cursor's agent mode can now call ShipWave tools from any chat.

Once connected, try prompts like:

• "Create a return label for order #12345 using the cheapest USPS rate."
• "List all orders shipped to California in the last 7 days that are still in-transit."
• "Void the unused label on shipment SHP-2026-04-1842."
• "Bulk-update the Amazon listing for SKU LEVY-BATTERY-36V to price $129.99."

The agent will preview any write action before executing it.