Claude Can Shop Smarter Than You. Here's How to Use That for Your Business
Most people are still using AI to write emails or summarize documents. Nicole Ruiz is using Claude to research brands, automate returns, and find products built to last decades. Her workflow, published in Lenny's Newsletter, is a masterclass in what's actually possible when you stop treating AI like a search engine and start treating it like a research analyst.
Here's what's worth your attention, and more importantly, how the same thinking applies to your business.
The core idea: Claude as a procurement agent, not a chatbot
Ruiz isn't asking Claude "what's a good blender." She's giving it detailed criteria, asking it to evaluate brands against those criteria, and having it return a ranked recommendation with sourcing context. That's a fundamentally different use case.
She treats Claude like a junior analyst who can read, synthesize, and report back. The result is faster decisions with better information, not just faster searches with the same noise.
For small business owners, this reframe matters. You're not asking Claude to be Google. You're briefing it like a contractor who's going to do the legwork and come back with a recommendation you can act on.
What she's actually doing in the workflow
Ruiz has built a repeatable system. She starts with a detailed brief: what she needs, what quality means to her, what her constraints are (budget, sustainability, longevity). Then she feeds that brief to Claude and asks it to research and rank.
For returns, she's gone further. She documents the purchase details, the return policy, and the reason for return, then asks Claude to draft the communication. She's not writing a return email from scratch. She's reviewing and sending what Claude drafted.
The "buy things that last 100 years" framing is about asking Claude to identify manufacturers and brands with documented longevity, not just marketing claims. She's using it to cut through greenwashing and find suppliers with actual track records.
That last part is directly transferable. If you're sourcing materials, equipment, or vendors for your business, this exact method applies.
How to adapt this for your business right now
You don't need to be buying furniture or kitchen equipment to use this approach. Think about what you're evaluating regularly in your business:
Software tools. Suppliers. Contractors. Service providers.
Try this prompt structure the next time you're evaluating anything:
"I'm a [type of business owner] evaluating [category]. My priorities are [list 3-4 specific criteria]. I don't care about [what doesn't matter to you]. Please research and rank the top 3 options with a short rationale for each, and flag any red flags you found."
That's it. You'll get a structured comparison that would have taken you two hours to build manually, and Claude will surface things you wouldn't have thought to look for.
If you use Claude's Projects feature, you can save this as a standing prompt and reuse the framework every time a new evaluation comes up. One setup, repeatable results.
The returns workflow is the underrated gem
Most business owners are sitting on unresolved vendor disputes, delayed refunds, and overdue service credits they never followed up on because writing the communication felt like work they'd do "later."
Claude can handle the draft in under two minutes. Give it the purchase date, the product or service name, what went wrong, and what outcome you want. Ask it to write a professional but direct message requesting the resolution. Review it, adjust the tone if needed, send it.
It's not about being lazy. It's about removing the friction that causes you to let money sit on the table because the admin felt heavier than the amount.
One business owner I know had three unresolved software subscription overcharges he'd been meaning to dispute for months. He ran them through Claude in one sitting, had drafts in ten minutes, and recovered over $600 in credits by end of week. The research wasn't the bottleneck. The writing was.
The real takeaway: brief Claude like an analyst, not a search engine
The shift Ruiz has made, and the one that matters for your business, is moving from "ask Claude a question" to "give Claude a brief and let it work."
Questions get answers. Briefs get analysis.
When you brief Claude with context, constraints, and criteria, you get back something you can actually use to make a decision. That's different from getting a list of options you still have to sort through yourself.
This works for vendor evaluation, tool selection, contractor research, dispute resolution, supplier comparison, and any other decision in your business that involves researching options and making a call.
Your one action for today
Pick one decision you've been putting off in your business because the research felt like too much work. It could be a software comparison, a vendor you've been meaning to evaluate, or a refund you haven't chased yet.
Write a two-paragraph brief: who you are, what you need, what matters to you, what you want back. Paste it into Claude and let it run.
You'll have something actionable in under five minutes. And you'll understand exactly why Ruiz built this into a repeatable system.