# 🛒 Melbis Shop — self-hosted e-commerce with an AI agent on staff

**Melbis Shop** is a self-hosted e-commerce platform: your server, your domain, your data. A native **Windows back-office** and a **PHP storefront** share one business logic, and the package ships an **MCP server**, so an AI agent — Claude Code, Goose, Cherry Studio, anything that speaks MCP — works in your store as an employee: under a staff login, with that person's permissions, every action signed by their name.

Built since 2002 for stores with real teams: several suppliers and price lists, hundreds to hundreds of thousands of products, staff who must not see each other's data.

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## 🎯 Who it is for

A seller who has outgrown a marketplace and wants an own channel next to it — with a team of two to five people, suppliers' price lists and hundreds of SKUs. Not a page builder for a single product.

## ⚙️ Installation is automatic

You do not touch a console. In the Windows client you enter three things — the server's address, its root password and your domain — and the client installs everything over SSH itself: Docker, nginx, MySQL, PHP, the SSL certificate, the store. Updates run the same way, from the same window. A clean Ubuntu VPS becomes a working store in one sitting.

Seven steps with screenshots, from renting a server to the first task for the agent: https://melbis.com/en/doc/install/start/

## 🤖 What the AI agent does here

- **56 MCP tools** in the box: project files (modules, templates, statics, images — with version history), the database (pools of steps with locks and cache marks), catalogue trees, product files, storefront pages as a visitor sees them, and the platform documentation itself.
- **26 store tools with 244 commands** come with the demo store: products and prices, descriptions, catalogue and attributes, suppliers, orders, scheduler tasks, users, image profiles, batch import of goods and files.
- **Permissions per command.** Tools are data, not code: the owner grants each command to a person or a group. An employee with no database access still runs the agent — inside their own rights.
- **A real run, with the log and screenshots:** one message in plain words → the first working version of a store — currencies, suppliers, a catalogue with 12 products, three roles with separate rights, a business-process roadmap — in **24 min 45 s and 21.2k tokens**. Half an hour more: a redesign from a free third-party template. → https://melbis.com/en/doc/install/ai_work/

### Connecting an MCP client

The MCP server (`MelbisMCP.exe`, stdio) is installed together with the Windows client — nothing to download separately. In the client open *System → Connection → AI Assistant*: the ready configuration is there with a **Copy** button for Goose, Cherry Studio and other MCP applications; **Check Connection** tests the licence, the login and the rights and says in words what is missing. Claude Code needs no configuration at all — the client writes `.mcp.json` into the store folder, open that folder as a project. The agent signs in under the person who runs it; there is no separate AI account, licence or password in the chat.

## 🚀 What makes the platform different

- 🧮 **One business logic** for the storefront and the back-office: an order is calculated by the same code in the Windows app and on the site. Nothing to synchronise, nothing to diverge.
- 🔐 **Permissions down to the operation, the hour of the day and the server load**, plus four independent access planes on every catalogue section — descriptions, prices, placement, browse. Content managers never see purchase prices.
- ⚡ **Batch back-office.** Staff load a slice of the catalogue into a local database, edit it like a spreadsheet — bulk assignments, formulas per column — and push the changes in one packet. The storefront runs almost read-only.
- 🧊 **Five-level cache** whose dependencies are collected automatically from the queries a module runs. Trick cache serves an older copy under a load spike; Smart cache refreshes ahead of expiry in a quiet moment.
- 📦 **Versioned orders**, supplier warehouses and stock, tax rules on a territory tree, discount groups, customer groups with automatic loyalty rules, printed documents on FastReport.
- 🛠️ **A development environment inside the back-office**: modules, templates and statics edited on the server with version history, SQL consoles, per-module cache settings, AI help in the editor with any OpenAI-compatible model and your own key.
- 🧩 **Storefront on your stack**: the built-in PHP template engine, or Laravel on the same order logic — [melbis/melbis-shop-laravel](https://github.com/melbis/melbis-shop-laravel).
- 🌍 Interface in 8 languages; storefront content translated by hand or automatically.

## 🖥️ What is under the hood

- **Server:** Ubuntu with Docker — nginx 1.26, PHP 8.3 on Apache, MySQL 8.4, Certbot for SSL. Installed and updated by the client; the same `setup.sh` and `update.sh` live in this repository.
- **Client:** a native Windows application with a local Firebird database per store.
- **AI agent:** any MCP-capable application on the same Windows machine. The MCP server is part of the client package; no separate licence.

## 💰 Licensing

Free to install and run in demo mode. A licence is bound to a staff login, not to a computer, and starts at **1 € per day**; monthly and yearly licences, full functionality in every plan: https://melbis.com/en/price/

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## 🔗 Links

- 🌍 **Website:** [melbis.com](https://melbis.com/en/)
- 📖 **Documentation — installation and the AI agent:** [melbis.com/en/doc/install/start](https://melbis.com/en/doc/install/start/)
- 📘 **Reference of the Windows client:** [melbis.com/help/en](https://melbis.com/help/en/)
- 📚 **Platform guide in Markdown:** [docs](https://github.com/melbis/melbis-shop/blob/master/docs/index.md)
- 📀 **Installation packages:** [melbis.com/en/download](https://melbis.com/en/download/)
- 💻 **Releases:** [melbis/melbis-shop/releases](https://github.com/melbis/melbis-shop/releases)
- 🐳 **Docker Hub:** [melbis/melbis-shop](https://hub.docker.com/r/melbis/melbis-shop)
- 📦 **Packagist:** [melbis/melbis-shop](https://packagist.org/packages/melbis/melbis-shop)
- 🧾 **System requirements:** [wiki](https://github.com/melbis/melbis-shop/wiki/System-requirements)
- 💬 **Discussions:** [github.com/melbis/melbis-shop/discussions](https://github.com/melbis/melbis-shop/discussions)
- 🖼️ **Screenshots:** [melbis.com/en/screenshots](https://melbis.com/en/screenshots/)

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*Your server. Your domain. Your AI partner.*