How to connect your digital menu to ChatGPT or Claude and handle WhatsApp orders with AI (2026)
Marea Alcalina publishes an official MCP server at mcp.mareaalcalina.com/mcp. You connect it to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor with your own account, without pasting any key, and then ask the AI in the chat to add products, change prices or mark items as sold out. Orders keep arriving on WhatsApp exactly as before.
What does selling on WhatsApp with artificial intelligence mean in 2026?
Selling on WhatsApp with artificial intelligence is no longer about asking a chatbot to write nice copy for you. Today it means something far more concrete: connecting ChatGPT or Claude to your ordering page so the AI operates it for you. Marea Alcalina publishes an official connector at https://mcp.mareaalcalina.com/mcp that does exactly that, and it is the part almost nobody explains when they talk about AI for small business.
MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, is the standard AI assistants use to talk to external tools. Once you connect your Marea Alcalina digital menu through it, the assistant stops guessing: it sees your real products, your real prices and your real opening hours, and it can change them when you ask in plain language.
The connector works with Claude on claude.ai, on the desktop app and on mobile, with Claude Code, with ChatGPT through a custom connector or developer mode, with Cursor and with any MCP client that supports OAuth 2.1. That last detail matters more than it looks: because authentication is OAuth, you sign in with your own Marea Alcalina account and approve access on a permissions screen. There is no key to copy and paste.
If you were looking for how to connect ChatGPT to your catalog and only found tutorials about pasting text back and forth, this is the difference. On September 16, 2026 we checked the Claude and ChatGPT connector directories and the public MCP registry, and Marea Alcalina is the only WhatsApp commerce platform in Latin America with an official MCP connector.
And if you came looking for an AI agent for your restaurant, here is the honest part up front: the connected AI manages your catalog, it does not answer your customers on WhatsApp. It takes over the data entry and the menu design work, which is where the afternoon goes. Taking WhatsApp orders with AI, today, means the page that receives those orders keeps itself up to date because you dictate the changes to a chat.
See your catalog as it stands today
Ask for the full list and it answers with your products, their prices and their categories, without opening the dashboard or searching for anything.
Add and edit products
Dictate six new dishes with their description and price and they land on your page. It also fixes the ones already there.
Change prices in seconds
A seasonal adjustment, an even increase across a category or a mistyped price, all in a single instruction.
Mark items as sold out
The fish of the day runs out and you say so in the chat. The product is flagged and anyone opening your page sees it right away.
Hours, delivery and order types
Change your opening hours, the delivery fee and whether you accept home delivery, pickup or dine in.
Branding, categories and new pages
Adjust colors, logo and category order. It can also create a new page and publish it, with an active plan and the terms accepted.
Why can ChatGPT alone not receive your orders?
This is the part that confuses most people. ChatGPT writes you a full menu in thirty seconds, with appetizing descriptions and even names for your combos. What it cannot do is be the place where your customer orders.
A language model has no web address of its own for your business. It cannot take an order from a stranger who will never open a ChatGPT account. It does not keep that customer's record for the next purchase. It does not work out the delivery fee based on the distance to your zone. And it cannot put a sold out label on something that exists nowhere. It writes text, and that is a legitimate limit.
Marea Alcalina supplies exactly what is missing: the public page with its own link, the order button that builds the WhatsApp message, the record of every order and every customer, the delivery zones with their fees and the sold out switch your buyer sees instantly. When you connect the MCP server, the AI becomes the operator of that infrastructure.
Put simply: ChatGPT writes, Marea Alcalina operates. That division is what makes the combination useful. The model thinks and writes, the platform charges, delivers and leaves a record of what happened.
Is it better by hand, with ChatGPT alone, or connecting the AI to Marea Alcalina?
The table compares the three ways of building and maintaining a catalog with WhatsApp orders. The Marea Alcalina column is the platform with the MCP connector active, meaning artificial intelligence operating your page.
| Tarea | A mano | Solo con ChatGPT | Marea Alcalina |
|---|---|---|---|
| Escribir el menú | Horas de captura | Minutos, la IA lo redacta | Minutos, y queda guardado en tu página |
| Página con pedidos | Hay que contratar y armar un sitio | No, un chat no es una página pública | Incluida, con enlace propio para compartir |
| Número de WhatsApp para pedidos | Copias y pegas cada pedido a mano | No, ChatGPT no envía WhatsApp | El botón arma el mensaje y te llega a tu WhatsApp |
| Cambiar precios desde el chat | Editas producto por producto | Solo cambia el texto del chat | Se lo pides y cambia en la página |
| Marcar agotados | Tachas el menú impreso | No aplica | Se lo pides y el cliente lo ve al instante |
| Envío por zonas | Lo calculas de memoria | No aplica | Zonas con costo y distancia configurables |
| Registro de pedidos | Libreta o capturas de pantalla | No queda registro | Historial de pedidos y ficha de cliente |
| Costo | Tu tiempo | La suscripción de tu asistente | Crear la página es gratis; publicar desde $200 MXN/mes |
How do you connect your Marea Alcalina page to Claude or ChatGPT step by step?
The whole process takes a few minutes and requires no installation and no coding. These are the five steps, in order.
Create your page on Marea Alcalina
Go to mareaalcalina.com and build your catalog. Creating the page is free; to publish it and start receiving orders you pick a plan from $200 MXN per month.
Open the connectors in your assistant
In Claude: Settings, then Connectors, then Add custom connector. In ChatGPT: Settings and Connectors, or developer mode if your account does not show the option yet.
Paste the server address
The address is https://mcp.mareaalcalina.com/mcp and it is the same for every MCP client. There is no key or token to copy. You paste the address and hit Connect.
Sign in and authorize
A Marea Alcalina window opens. You sign in with your usual account, read the permissions screen and hit Authorize. The window closes on its own and the connector is ready.
Try it with a simple instruction
Type something like "list my products with their prices". If it answers with your real catalog, the connection is working and you can start asking for changes.
What can you ask the AI once it is connected?
These instructions are written the way anyone would say them, with no jargon. They work the same in Claude and in ChatGPT once the Marea Alcalina connector is authorized.
«List my products with their prices and tell me which ones have no photo.»
A one minute catalog audit. This is the instruction to start with, because it confirms the connection is live.
«Add these six new dishes with their price and a short description for each.»
You paste the list exactly as you have it in a note or a photo of your menu and the AI enters it with decent descriptions.
«Raise the price of every drink by ten percent.»
Bulk price changes save the most time. Ask it to show you the before and after first if you want to review the change.
«Mark the carrot cake as sold out.»
This is the mid afternoon instruction, when something runs out and you do not want to open a computer. Your customer sees it right away.
«Change Sunday hours to 9 to 3 and raise the delivery fee to 40 pesos.»
Hours, delivery fees and order types are configuration, and configuration can be dictated too.
«Create a new page for the downtown location with the same categories.»
The AI can build a page from scratch and publish it. It is the favorite use case of anyone running several locations.
Publishing from the chat has two conditions that cannot be skipped: your account needs an active plan and the terms accepted. If either is missing, the assistant tells you instead of failing silently.
What can the AI not do with your page yet?
The honest list matters as much as the feature list, because it is the one that keeps you from buying the wrong expectation. Today the Marea Alcalina connector manages catalog and settings. These four things it does not do yet:
Read or manage orders
It cannot look up your orders or change their status from the chat yet. You still see orders on WhatsApp and in your dashboard, with the full history.
See or edit your customers
The customer record is not available to the assistant yet. You manage it from the dashboard, as always.
Generate photos of your products
The connector does not create images. You upload the photos yourself, and they remain the thing that moves average ticket the most on a menu.
Message your buyers
The AI does not send WhatsApp messages to your customers. It is not an auto responder and it does not pretend to be one yet.
So the right sentence is not that the AI runs your business, but that it keeps your catalog current. Orders keep arriving on your WhatsApp with the message already composed, exactly as before you connected anything.
What permissions are you granting and how do you revoke them?
Before connecting, Marea Alcalina shows you a consent screen with what the assistant will be able to do with your account. It is worth reading. It follows the same logic as connecting an app to your email or your calendar.
Access is revoked whenever you want from your Marea Alcalina dashboard, under Developers, in the API keys section. There you see the active authorizations and cut them with one click. From that moment the assistant stops seeing your catalog.
One practical recommendation: connect with the account that actually manages the page and do not share that session. The assistant inherits what your account can do, no more and no less, so account hygiene is connector hygiene.
The technical documentation for the MCP server, with the list of available tools and the detail of the authorization flow, is published at docs.mareaalcalina.com/quickstart/mcp.
Which businesses really benefit from connecting AI to their catalog?
The ones that change things every day. A restaurant with a daily menu spends its life fixing prices and marking items sold out, and that is exactly what the AI connected to Marea Alcalina does in one sentence. If you run a kitchen, the saving is not in the initial design but in the daily upkeep.
Anyone selling by season. A boutique rotating collections, a bakery with seasonal orders or any business building promotions every two weeks loads dozens of products at a time. Dictating the list to the assistant and reviewing the result is faster than typing them one by one, and the result lands on the page, not in the chat.
And anyone running several pages. Agencies and businesses with multiple locations can ask the AI to replicate a whole structure on a new page. Marea Alcalina lets each location have its own WhatsApp number, prices and hours, and the connector reaches every page in the account you authorized.
What to do if the connector does not show up or fails?
Almost every hiccup while connecting is an account or a browser issue, not the server. These are the five most common ones and how to fix them.
I cannot see the connectors option in ChatGPT
It depends on your plan and on how the feature is enabled for your account. If it is not under Settings, look for developer mode, which is where ChatGPT lets you add an MCP server by typing its address.
The authorization window closes without connecting
Usually a pop up blocker or a stale session. Allow pop ups for the site, sign out, sign back into your Marea Alcalina account and try the connection again.
The assistant says it cannot find my products
Check which account you authorized with. If you manage several pages, first ask it to list the pages on the account and tell it explicitly which one you want to work on.
It says it cannot publish
Publishing needs an active plan and the terms accepted. Go to your dashboard, check your plan status and ask for the publication again from the chat.
I asked it to show my orders and it could not
That is not a failure. Orders and customers are not available through the connector yet. That part stays on WhatsApp and in your Marea Alcalina dashboard.