You may have heard the news from Stripe Tour New York that Woo is one of the platforms working with Stripe to support their new Agentic Commerce Protocol. This is just one of many projects in the works to achieve our goal of bringing Woo merchants into the future of ecommerce — a future being redefined by the advancements in AI.
Imagine a customer asking their AI assistant to “find me a gift for my sister who loves gardening” or “reorder my usual coffee beans” — and having that AI search your catalog, understand your product offerings, and complete the purchase without the customer ever visiting your store. On the merchant side, a future AI assistant would instantly access your store data, make changes, and provide insights without you ever logging into your dashboard. These are just a few of the possibilities opening up as AI tools become more powerful.
Our team, in collaboration with our in-house AI specialists and key partnerships, has been exploring and iterating on what this future will look like for the Woo ecosystem. Here are a few of the initiatives we’ve been working on to ensure that your storefronts will be ready for this new landscape.
MCP and Abilities API
This month, WooCommerce 10.3 will introduce the first version of the WooCommerce MCP. This new protocol enables AI assistants like Claude, Cursor, VS Code, or any other MCP-compatible client to interact directly with WooCommerce stores through a standardized approach, opening up new possibilities for AI-assisted store management and development workflows.
Key to our approach is a commitment to extensibility and the open source ethos. While the WordPress core team is building the infrastructure for AI, we’re contributing alongside them, ensuring that WooCommerce is using and improving the same APIs and frameworks available to the entire ecosystem and our developer community.
Today, that work begins with the WordPress Abilities API, the foundational interaction layer underneath the WooCommerce MCP. As WooCommerce core and extensions begin exposing more abilities through this API, store owners will be able to interact with them in a number of ways, from a separate MCP client to the WordPress native user interfaces like an AI chatbot or the command palette.
The initial version of the WooCommerce MCP covers both product and order management, including searching, adding, and updating products in your store’s catalog, as well as creating and managing orders. When paired with our existing REST and Store APIs, MCP has the goal of expanding beyond store management and potentially powering consumer shopping and checkout — also known as agentic commerce.
Agentic Commerce
From chatbots offering product recommendations to autonomous shoppers who know your preferences and can predict your next purchase, agentic commerce has the potential to transform online shopping from a destination-based activity into an ambient experience. This new shopping paradigm revolves around two critical capabilities: making your products discoverable to AI agents that are helping customers solve problems, and enabling those agents to securely complete transactions on behalf of their users.
For product discoverability, we’re building on the same foundational work that already surfaces your store’s products across Google, Meta, and TikTok — but extending it into AI-native experiences. Just as WooCommerce led the way in making merchants accessible on today’s major platforms, we’re positioning ourselves at the forefront of tomorrow’s AI marketplaces. We’re experimenting with emerging standards like OpenAI’s Product Feed Spec, ensuring that when a customer asks an AI assistant about products in your category, your catalog is ready to be discovered.
For instant, off-site checkout, WooCommerce has been rigorously testing solutions from partners like Google and Stripe to ensure transactions are both seamless and secure. Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, for example, is going to be a natural fit for the WooCommerce MCP and Store API, and work on that has already begun. We’re actively investigating many emerging protocols, so stay tuned to see how these integrations and capabilities evolve.
Agentic commerce, while still a new concept, could signal a foundational shift in shopper behavior. At its core, though, it requires a robust and flexible storefront that is built for scale and extensibility. This is where WooCommerce’s open-source foundation becomes our competitive advantage: a platform designed from the ground up for extensibility, backed by a community of developers and partners who adapt and evolve alongside emerging technologies.
The future of AI in Woo
Woo has never been more excited about the future of ecommerce, with AI becoming an entirely new landscape for merchants to grow their businesses and meet their customers. The foundational work we’re doing with WooCommerce Abilities and MCP is the first step towards positioning your store to thrive in an evolving landscape. Join the conversation and share your vision with us in our new #ai-and-mcp channel in the WooCommerce Community Slack or on social media.
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