Retail Reason client distribution

Retail Reason is a hosted expert service for people who operate on Walmart's supplier and seller platforms: Walmart suppliers, Sam's Club suppliers, Marketplace sellers, and the consultants and agencies who serve them. It answers operational questions about metric definitions, screen paths, thresholds and dispute channels. It checks draft deliverables for pitfalls and returns an as_of verification date with each answer. A dated answer is not a promise that every change is detected immediately.

This repository contains only the thin clients: a plugin for Claude Code and Cowork, a Codex CLI config, and the public capability map. All expertise is delivered by the hosted service over an authenticated MCP connection; a user-bound access key (wadv_live_...) is required for Claude Code and Codex. The current, maintained setup instructions for every supported client live at https://retailreason.com/docs/connect/; this README mirrors them. Keys are bound to one named user and Retail Reason account. Do not share them. Each named user may keep at most two keys active so rotation can overlap; every key expires within 180 days and can be revoked sooner by the user or an account owner/admin.

Retail Reason is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a product of Walmart Inc.; "Walmart" and the platform names below are used only to describe who the service is for and what it covers.

Install: Claude Code

1. Add the marketplace:

   code

   /plugin marketplace add https://github.com/RetailReason/retail-reason-plugins
   

2. Install the plugin:

   code

   /plugin install retail-reason@retail-reason
   

   (retail-reason is both the plugin and the marketplace identifier. Installs made before September 6, 2026 used walmart-advisor@walmart-advisory; remove that marketplace with /plugin marketplace remove walmart-advisory, then add and install as above.)

3. When prompted, enter a Retail Reason access key (wadv_live_...) created in your Retail Reason account at https://app.retailreason.com/app/access. An eligible account with active access is required; this repository cannot issue a key. The service address is included in the plugin, so no server address needs to be entered.

4. Restart Claude Code and ask any Walmart supplier/seller question to confirm it works.

If the key stops working after a restart: the key is stored in your OS keychain and can occasionally drop. Re-enter it in the plugin's settings (/plugin → Retail Reason → configure). If it keeps happening, use the env-var fallback: set export WADV_LICENSE_KEY="wadv_live_..." in your shell profile and edit the installed plugin's .mcp.json to read "Authorization": "Bearer ${WADV_LICENSE_KEY}". Claude Code expands environment variables in MCP headers.

Install: Claude Cowork

1. In Claude, open Customize → Plugins → Add → Add marketplace and choose Add from a repository. Select RetailReason/retail-reason-plugins or enter https://github.com/RetailReason/retail-reason-plugins, then sync the marketplace.
2. Add Retail Reason and open its Connectors tab. Choose Connect for retail-reason. The server address is https://mcp.retailreason.com/mcp.
3. Use Sign in now and Use Claude's published identity. Add the connector, then choose Connect if sign-in has not opened. Sign in with the same identity that owns your active Retail Reason membership.
4. Start a new Cowork task and ask a supplier or seller question using Retail Reason. Confirm that a Retail Reason tool returns the answer and its as_of verification date.

Cowork uses account sign-in. Do not enter a Claude Code access key as a request header or in chat. If authorization fails, share the displayed support reference with matt@retailreason.com. The plugin's Skills tab should list both setup and walmart-advisor.

Install: Codex CLI

See codex/README.md: export WADV_LICENSE_KEY, paste codex/config-snippet.toml into ~/.codex/config.toml, and optionally install the Codex thin skill plugin.

Hosted and command-line clients

Supported at launch: Claude hosted, Claude Code, and Codex CLI. Claude hosted connects through Retail Reason's WorkOS-backed OAuth flow from the account application; it does not use the CLI key above. Follow the in-account connection instructions, and never paste a wadv_live_... key into Claude hosted.

ChatGPT is coming soon and is not supported at launch. It remains disabled, and no ChatGPT subscription or admin setup is required for the supported launch paths. This repository intentionally does not invent a ChatGPT connector URL or imply that path is live.

Key and workspace management

• Create a separate key for each named user; never reuse an owner, advisor, or client-guest key for another person.
• A user may have two active keys at once for overlap during rotation. Create the replacement, update Claude Code/Codex, verify it, then revoke the old key. Keys expire after at most 180 days even if they are not rotated manually.
• Users can revoke their own keys. Account owners/admins can revoke any key in their account. Revocation is the first response to a copied, exposed, or lost key.
• Operator accounts normally have one workspace. Advisor users with more than one available client workspace select the workspace for each conversation; the client passes its workspace_id on every workspace-sensitive call, including get_capabilities, questions, and pitfall checks. A client guest is limited to the one workspace assigned by the Advisor Practice or Advisor Network account.

The capability map (capabilities/capabilities.json)

This file is the curated, public description of what the service covers. No client reads it. It is ingested by the hosted service, and the get_capabilities tool renders the same four subject domains for accounts with active access. A workspace's verified Scintilla tier changes which guidance is applicable to that workspace; it does not remove a commercial subject domain. The response is:

• Merged and retitled. The file is keyed internally (supplier_academy, scintilla_basic, scintilla_charter, marketplace, supplier_one); the answer is grouped under four presented areas: Walmart supplier fundamentals, Scintilla / Walmart data, Walmart Marketplace, Supplier One. The two Scintilla source sets merge into the one Scintilla area, with topics and example questions concatenated and de-duplicated.

Editing this file changes what users see only after the service re-ingests the corpus; reinstalling the plugin changes nothing. Keep entries outcome-shaped: the leak-guard below cannot catch a topic list that mirrors internal structure.

Support

Support is by email at matt@retailreason.com, a monitored mailbox answered by the operator directly. (Startup Success Lab LLC is the entity behind Retail Reason.) Include your org name and roughly when the problem happened; never include your access key.

Contributing / maintainers

Before committing, run these checks. All must pass:

./scripts/leak-check.sh
./scripts/brand-check.sh
node scripts/claude-plugin-check.mjs

Clean-clone CI validates every shipped JSON file and runs the branding and static leak guards once on every pull request. The byte-identical merge to main does not rerun those checks. Because that public CI checkout cannot read the private corpus repository, a release still requires a separately recorded successful leak-check.sh --strict run against the exact corpus source checkout.

leak-check.sh: what must never ship

It scans every file in this repo for strings that must never ship publicly. Wire it as a pre-commit hook. The script resolves its real location through the symlink. Any non-zero exit blocks the commit, whether a leak was found or the check failed to run:

ln -s ../../scripts/leak-check.sh .git/hooks/pre-commit

Two modes:

• Default: if the private corpus repo is not on the machine, the internal-name denylist is skipped with a note and the static checks still run. This is the contributor mode: most machines legitimately lack the corpus repo.
• --strict: fails (exit 2) unless the denylist was actually built from the corpus repo. Use this wherever the corpus checkout exists (Matt's machine, release checks): WADV_CORPUS_REPO=path/to/corpus-repo ./scripts/leak-check.sh --strict. A sibling directory with the expected layout is auto-detected when the env var is unset.

The guard matches literal strings only. It cannot catch structural leaks: prose whose shape mirrors the private skill taxonomy one-to-one. Trigger language in SKILL.md and tool descriptions must stay broad and outcome-shaped; that part is human review.

brand-check.sh: what the buyer is told this product is

Every file here is something a buyer reads. The rename to Retail Reason reached the server (serverInfo.name, /healthz) without ever reaching this repo, so for a while the install path advertised a product name the customer had never been billed for. brand-check.sh fails when the retired name reappears, when a buyer-facing surface stops naming Retail Reason, when install copy describes the shipped production endpoint as a local-development placeholder, or when a customer-facing placeholder is left unresolved.

It deliberately does not police machine identifiers. The marketplace and plugin id (retail-reason), the skill directory (walmart-advisor), the MCP server key, the wadv_live_ key prefix and WADV_LICENSE_KEY are wire values pinned by the backend's test/distribution.test.ts; the MCP tool names (ask_walmart, check_walmart_pitfalls, …) are the protocol contract. Changing any of them is a coordinated two-repo change that breaks existing installs. It must not happen as a side effect of a copy edit.

Naming rule the check encodes: the product is Retail Reason, and Walmart is named only to describe who the service is for ("for Walmart suppliers"). Walmart must not be part of the product's own name in a heading or manifest display field.

Endpoint

The plugin ships with this MCP endpoint configured:

https://mcp.retailreason.com/mcp

The endpoint has its own host, separate from the account/billing API. Access still requires an eligible account with active access and a user-bound key for Claude Code and Codex. Follow the current connection guide above for your client and account.

Developers using a separate local backend can edit the URL in their local Claude Code or Codex MCP configuration to http://localhost:8787/mcp. Use credentials issued for that environment.

License

The files in this repository are released under the MIT License. The hosted Retail Reason service, its knowledge corpus, and its answers are not part of this repository and are governed by the Retail Reason Terms at https://retailreason.com/terms/.