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Hermes Agent For Ecommerce: Five Copy-Paste Prompts That Run Your Shop's Back Office In Your Agent OS

By Julian Goldie · 8 November 2026 · agentos.guide

Hermes Agent for ecommerce runs inside your Agent OS as a shop back office: five prompts set up the skills and scheduled jobs, and you stay the one who publishes, refunds and replies.

Below is the quick start, the five prompts to paste in order and the weekly routine that ties them together.

Each feature comes from the official Hermes docs or the v0.23.0 catalogs, and none of it needs a store plugin.

Prefer help with your own shop? Book a free SEO strategy session with my team.

Quick Start: Three Moves Before Prompt 1

1. Create a dedicated profile with hermes profile create shop; the profiles docs keep its memory, skills and jobs apart from everything else.
2. Connect the one chat app you check most, such as Telegram, through the gateway, and allow only your own account.
3. Export your product list from the store admin as a CSV and save it in the profile's working folder.

Then open the profile with hermes -p shop chat.

Keep the export's column names stable from week to week, so the prompts below can rely on them.

Remember there is no Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce plugin in either catalog, so the export is how your products get in.

Prompt 1: Build The Product-Copy Skill

Read products.csv in this folder.
Create a skill called product-copy for this profile, using
the three listings I paste below as the house style.
Each draft: title, two-line summary, five feature bullets,
care or sizing notes, and a meta description.
Rules: never invent specs, ratings or reviews; flag any
product with missing data instead of guessing.
Every output is a draft. Save drafts to drafts/copy/.
Show me the skill before you save it.

The skills docs store it under ~/.hermes/skills/, so you can open the file and tidy it yourself.

A tea merchant would paste in her best three blends and add brewing notes as a required field.

What you get back: one skill, then a folder of drafts you paste into the store by hand.

Prompt 2: Connect Payments With Guardrails

Add the Stripe MCP from the catalog.
After I authorise it, set this server to trust: untrusted
and exclude the tools delete_customer and refund_payment.
Then list every tool that is left and tell me which ones
can write.

Asking in chat opens a setup card, as the MCP docs describe, and Hermes never opens the browser for the sign-in on its own.

The exclusion list mirrors the Stripe example in the MCP config reference.

Swap in Square or PayPal if that is what your till uses; both are in the Nous-approved catalog.

What you get back: a payment server that can read freely and must ask before any write.

A florist taking card payments online would run this once and then forget about it, because the guardrails live in the config, not in her memory.

🔥 Want the shop prompts pre-loaded in an Agent OS?

Inside the AI Profit Boardroom you get step-by-step video trainings, the installable Agent OS, four coaching calls a week and 3,400+ members running agents for their own shops.

→ Join the AI Profit Boardroom

Prompt 3: The Rival Price Watch

Use the product-price-monitor skill.
Watch these three competitor listings for the same item:
[URL 1] [URL 2] [URL 3]
Alert me if any drops below our price or comes back in stock.
Take one live baseline now and show it to me before you
schedule anything. Check twice a day, and respect each
site's rate limits and terms. Deliver alerts to Telegram.

The skill page insists on a working foreground fetch before it schedules the repeat check, which is why the prompt asks for the baseline first.

It saves each watch as a file under ~/.hermes/price-watches/ and skips repeat alerts for the same offer.

A fishing-tackle shop would point it at the same reel on three rival sites.

What you get back: silence on most days, and a short alert with the source link when a rule is met.

Prompt 4: The Morning Shop Report

Every day at 7am, read yesterday's Stripe payments and the
newest products.csv. Report: number of orders, failed or
disputed payments, products under 5 in stock, and any
price-watch alerts. Draft only: do not refund, edit, send
or publish anything. Deliver to Telegram.

The cron docs confirm Hermes builds the job from a plain request and delivers to the chat you name.

Check it with hermes cron list, and ask Hermes to pause it while you are on holiday.

Scheduled runs cannot make new jobs by default, and dangerous commands inside cron are denied.

What you get back: one message each morning, with empty sections marked as nothing to report.

Prompt 5: The Customer-Reply Drafting Queue

Use the email-inbox-triage skill on the support inbox.
Sort today's customer emails into urgent, reply, waiting
and noise. For each urgent or reply thread, write a draft
answer in our voice using the product-copy skill for facts.
Draft only: never send, archive or delete. Give me the list
with each draft underneath.

The bundled triage skill already defaults to read and draft, not send or delete, and the prompt says it again.

It reaches the mailbox through a connector skill such as google-workspace or himalaya, so set one of those up first.

That matters, because Hermes has no approval step on outgoing messages; its approvals cover risky commands and writes on untrusted MCP servers.

A homeware shop would paste the drafts into its helpdesk and send them after a quick read.

What you get back: a sorted list of today's emails with a draft under each one that needs an answer.

The Weekly Routine

📞 Want a second opinion on your product pages?

Book a free SEO strategy session and my team will go through your store's pages and search visibility with you.

→ Book the free session

Optional Extras Once The Five Are Steady

• Klaviyo: the catalog entry covers campaigns, flows, segments and reporting; ask for sale-email drafts, not scheduled sends.
• Stripe webhooks: the webhooks page lists Stripe among the services that can trigger a run, with HMAC checks.
• Ad images: image generation via FAL.ai suits mock-ups, never product photos.
• Dropshipping: the community dsers plugin names Shopify and WooCommerce in its ecosystem and can place supplier orders that spend money, so each one stops for approval.

Three Lines Every Shop Prompt Needs

1. The scope: which file, inbox or server the job may read, and nothing else.
2. The boundary: "Draft only: do not send, refund, edit or publish anything."
3. The destination: one chat or one folder, so results never scatter.

Add those three to any prompt you write yourself and it will behave like the five above.

A bookshop writing its own prompt for new-release blurbs, for example, would scope it to the publisher's catalogue file, say draft only, and send the results to one folder.

The same three lines make a job easy to audit later, because anyone reading the prompt can see what it may touch and where its work lands.

Troubleshooting The Five

• The Stripe tools did not appear: start a fresh session after the sign-in, as the setup card advises, then ask for the tool list again.
• A write ran without asking: check the server still says trust: untrusted and that YOLO is off for that chat.
• The price watch never alerts: ask to see the saved watch file and the last good observation; a fetch that failed is logged as unknown, not as a price.
• The morning report has gaps: a paid tool that would cross a chat's spend_limit is refused in cron, so run that part in chat instead.
• Drafts sound off-brand: edit the product-copy skill, not the prompt, so every job picks up the fix.

The security docs explain the approval modes in full if you need to dig deeper.

What Not To Ask For

• "Update my Shopify listings": no plugin exists for that.
• "Reply to customers for me": keep it to drafts.
• "Refund the late orders": the refund tool is excluded on purpose.
• "Turn on YOLO for speed": it skips the approval prompt on untrusted servers.

Where To Go Next

For the scheduling side in more depth, read our Hermes Agent cron job guide.

If you are weighing a hosted agent instead, our Grok Bot for ecommerce guide covers that route.

And the AI Profit Boardroom runs four coaching calls a week where members build setups like this one together.

FAQ

Do the prompts need a Shopify plugin?

No. None exists in the catalogs, so the prompts work from a CSV export of your products plus a payment server from the Nous-approved MCP catalog.

Why does each prompt say draft only?

Hermes has no approval step for outgoing messages. Writing draft only into the job keeps every customer-facing action with you.

Can I use Square instead of Stripe in Prompt 2?

Yes. Square and PayPal both have Nous-approved MCP catalog entries, so swap the name and keep the same guardrails.

How do I stop a scheduled job?

Ask Hermes to pause or remove it, or check your jobs with hermes cron list. Scheduled runs cannot create new jobs by default.

Which prompt should I run first?

Prompt 1, the product-copy skill, because the reply drafts in Prompt 5 lean on it for product facts.

Final word on Hermes Agent For Ecommerce

Paste the five prompts in order, keep the sends with you, and book a free SEO strategy session if you want my team to look at your product pages.

Run Prompt 1 today and your Agent OS has its first working piece of Hermes Agent for ecommerce.

Related guides on agentos.guide

→ Hermes vs Manus: Give Each Agent Its Job In Your Agent OS

→ Hermes Agent For Accounting: 5 Prompts In Your Agent OS

→ Hermes Agent For Real Estate: 5 Prompts In Your Agent OS

→ Grok Bot For Coding: Repo Triage Prompts In Your Agent OS

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