Quickstart

Aly is an agent-native commerce platform. You build a storefront (a site, products, memberships, voice agent), and every surface — catalog, cart, checkout, orders — is also reachable by external agents over standard protocols: MCP (Model Context Protocol), UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol), A2A (Agent-to-Agent), x402 (HTTP-native micropayments), and a conventional REST API.

This page walks you from zero to a published storefront and a working agent connection in about five minutes.

1. 1

   Sign in and create a site

   Open aly.store and sign in. From your dashboard, create a new site. Each site is published at https://<slug>.aly.store on a wildcard subdomain, or you can attach a custom domain later from Settings → Domains.

   Add at least one product. The same product schema (price, variants, media, optional digital file) powers the UI editor, REST catalog endpoints, UCP catalog lookup, MCP tools, and the storefront page.

2. 2

   Mint an API key

   Visit Settings → API keys. Create a key with the scopes your integration needs — for the Quickstart we'll use read:sites, read:content, and read:orders. The key starts with aly_ and is shown once.

   Bearer tokens only

   Aly's agent surfaces (MCP, UCP, A2A, REST merchant endpoints) accept aly_* API keys and aly_oauth_* OAuth tokens as bearer credentials. Browser session JWTs are explicitly rejected — use keys for anything non-interactive.
3. 3

   Call the REST API

   Confirm the credential works against a public storefront endpoint first — no scope required.

   bash

   1curl https://aly.store/api/storefront/v1/stores/your-slug/products \2  -H "Authorization: Bearer aly_..."

   The response is JSON with a paginated products array and a next_cursor. The same payload shape backs the editor and the storefront.

4. 4

   Connect an MCP client

   Point Claude Desktop or Cursor at the MCP server. The endpoint is https://aly.store/api/mcp, JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP, with a Bearer token. See Connect Claude Desktop or Connect Cursor for the exact config snippet.

   Once wired, the client sees ~80 tools across 23 families: sites, products, collections, orders, customers, memberships, media, voice, domains, analytics, webhooks, and more. See the Tools reference for the complete list.

5. 5

   Open a UCP checkout

   If your agent needs to transact, hit UCP directly. The flow is idempotent and signature-friendly:

   bash

   1curl -X POST https://aly.store/api/ucp/v1/checkout-sessions \2  -H "Authorization: Bearer aly_..." \3  -H "Idempotency-Key: $(uuidgen)" \4  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \5  -d '{6    "line_items": [{ "product_id": "prod_...", "quantity": 1 }],7    "shipping_address": { "country": "US", "state": "CA", "postcode": "94110" },8    "buyer": { "email": "buyer@example.com" }9  }'

   The response contains a continue_url for human-in-the-loop finalization and a signed Response-Signature header for downstream verification. Full reference at UCP overview.

Next steps

• Concepts — domain model: sites, products, carts, orders, agent tasks.
• Authentication — API keys, OAuth 2.1, scope catalog.
• MCP overview — full MCP server documentation.
• REST API — storefront + merchant endpoints.
• Changelog — what shipped recently.