🛒 MCP Server — Personal Shopping (Target Grocery)

An AI agent that does my grocery shopping. I tell Claude "2 gallons of whole milk, a dozen eggs, bananas" — it searches Target, compares prices and unit prices, shows me what it wants to add, and fills my cart. I review and check out myself. There is no checkout automation, on purpose.

Built as a weekend project on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — think of MCP as a USB port for AI apps: you plug a tool server into Claude, and Claude can suddenly do things, not just talk about them.

The agent's browser searching Target — 224 results for "whole milk", sorted by unit price, sponsored listings filtered out.

What it does (and doesn't)

5 tools, deliberately small:

unit_price ("$0.03" per fl oz) is the field that makes grocery picking sane — it's how you tell a gallon beats four half-gallons.

Sponsored results are filtered out. 6 of 30 results in a live sample were sponsored, so this matters.

Related MCP server: Shopping MCP Server (Amazon + Target)

How it's wired

flowchart LR
    A[You: shopping list] --> B[Claude]
    B -->|MCP tools| C[server.py<br/>5 thin tools]
    C --> D[target.py<br/>knows Target's pages & JSON]
    D --> E[browser.py<br/>real Chrome via Playwright]
    E --> F[target.com]
    F -->|search JSON<br/>intercepted in flight| D
    D -->|structured results| B
    B -->|proposed cart,<br/>you approve| A

Why a browser and not an API

Target has no public cart API. So this drives real Chrome via Playwright, in its own window, signing in with credentials you put in target.env.

Consequence: it's scraping. Expect to fix target.py when Target reshuffles their markup, and expect the occasional bot challenge you clear by hand.

This project previously targeted Walmart. Walmart's PerimeterX now hard-blocks an automated browser — /blocked, "Robot or human?", on the homepage. Target, checked the same hour from the same browser, served every page cleanly.

Setup, step by step

Works for total beginners — each step is one command.

Step 1 — Get the code and install dependencies

git clone https://github.com/ishita199615/MCP_Server_PersonalShopping.git
cd MCP_Server_PersonalShopping
python -m venv .venv && .venv/Scripts/python.exe -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Step 2 — Make sure Chrome is installed

The server drives real Chrome (channel="chrome"), not a bundled Chromium, in its own user-data-dir at .session/. Your everyday Chrome and its profiles are untouched.

Step 3 — Add your Target credentials (locally, never committed)

cp target.env.example target.env

Fill in TARGET_EMAIL and TARGET_PASSWORD. target.env is gitignored. The values are read at sign-in time, typed into Target's form, and never logged, cached, or returned from a tool — tool output goes into a model's context, so anything returned there would be a leak.

Step 4 — Plug it into Claude Code

Register at user scope, so the tools are available from any directory (replace the paths with wherever you cloned it):

claude mcp add target-grocery -s user -e PYTHONPATH=D:\shoppingMCP -- D:\shoppingMCP\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m target_mcp.server

That writes to ~/.claude.json. The paths are absolute — re-run it if you move the project. claude mcp list shows connection status.

PYTHONPATH is not optional: without it the server can't import target_mcp when launched from an unrelated working directory.

Step 5 — First run

1. Ask Claude to call login. A Chrome window opens and it signs in from target.env, ticking "keep me signed in".

2. You may get state: "needs_code". Target sends a one-time code on a new device. Type it into the open Chrome window — nothing here can read your email or texts — then call login again.

3. The session persists in .session/, so this is a first-run cost. After that login just reports.

Step 6 — Go shopping

Say something like:

"Add whole milk, bananas, and a dozen eggs to my Target cart — cheapest per unit, in stock at my store."

Claude searches, proposes picks with prices, and adds what you approve:

Same flow for bananas — the agent reads price, unit price, and store stock for each result.

The end state: a filled cart, waiting for a human to check out.

Check the store

login reports the store and ZIP the site is using. Grocery price and stock are per-store, and signing in switches to the store saved on your account — which may not be near you. Change it in the Chrome window; it persists.

If sign-in doesn't go through

Design notes

• browser.py — Playwright lifecycle, one persistent session dir, one shared page. Prefers patchright if installed; TARGET_MCP_PLAIN_PLAYWRIGHT=1 forces stock Playwright, TARGET_MCP_HEADLESS=1 hides the window (you'll regret it the first time a challenge appears), TARGET_MCP_SESSION_DIR moves .session/.

• creds.py — the only module that touches credentials. Reads target.env then .env with a twenty-line parser rather than taking a dependency on the credentials path. A real environment variable beats the file.

• target.py — the only module that knows Target's URLs, JSON shape, and selectors. When the site changes, this is the file you fix.

• server.py — thin tool definitions. Every failure comes back as a structured value (blocked, timeout, no_credentials, out_of_stock, add_button_not_found) rather than an exception across the MCP channel.

Five things that are not obvious

Search results are not in the page. Not in the HTML, not in __NEXT_DATA__ — both were checked and neither contains a single tcin. The product list arrives in a separate call to cdui-orchestrations.target.com/.../pages/slp. So search navigates and reads Target's own API response as it goes by, which means the results carry Target's store, ZIP and session without us reconstructing the request. DOM scraping is the fallback.

Groceries don't ship. shipping_options.availability_status is OUT_OF_STOCK for most of the dairy aisle. Stock lives in store_options[].order_pickup. Reading the shipping field as in_stock marks the whole aisle unavailable — there's a test pinning this.

Sponsored products appear twice. Once flagged, once as an unflagged copy elsewhere in the payload. Filtering node-by-node lets the ad back in through the side door, so extract_products collects every sponsored tcin first and excludes all of them.

The fulfillment tabs are never disabled. An unavailable one just reads "Not available", so is_enabled() returns true and clicking pickup blindly strands you on a dead tab — after which the buy button is gone and the failure looks like "markup changed". add_to_cart reads the tab text and picks a channel that actually works.

Cart lines are found via the delete button. [data-test*="cartItem"] hooks nest, so they return one product six times; every /p/ link on the page picks up the recommendation carousels instead. Only real cart lines have a delete button. The order summary likewise has its own elements — the word "Subtotal" never appears as body text, so regexing for it silently returns nothing.

Tests

.venv/Scripts/python.exe -m pytest tests -q

23 parser tests run offline against a captured pages/slp payload in tests/fixtures/. They're the early warning system: when Target changes their JSON, these fail loudly instead of the server quietly returning nulls.

For live checks:

.venv/Scripts/python.exe smoke_test.py "whole milk"

Add --login to sign in from target.env first, or --add <tcin> to exercise the cart write.

Known limits

• Quantity above 1 is not automated. add_to_cart adds one and says so — the product page used to build this had no quantity stepper. Adjust in the cart.

• view_cart parses a client-rendered page best-effort. If it returns parsed: false, trust the browser window over the tool output.

• Your store decides almost everything. Signing in switches to the store saved on your account, which may not be near you. A store that doesn't do grocery fulfillment returns pickup/delivery/shipping: false for every perishable item, and add_to_cart returns out_of_stock_at_store — the code is fine, the store is wrong. Check login, fix it in the browser.

• Target runs PerimeterX too — the same vendor now blocking Walmart. It is permissive today; that is not a guarantee.

One caveat worth stating plainly

Automated access is against Target's terms of service. This is your account and your groceries, but the account risk is yours.