Expanding Abilities across WooCommerce Extensions

WooCommerce abilities are named, schema-defined capabilities that describe what WooCommerce can do: query products, update an order status, read a subscription, inspect a payment account, or return shipping configuration. Each ability defines its inputs, outputs, permissions, and behavior so tools can discover and execute WooCommerce operations without each integration needing to invent its own contract.

WooCommerce 10.9 introduced the first canonical WooCommerce domain abilities for product and order operations. Those abilities are transport-neutral, which means the same underlying capability can be exposed through the WordPress Abilities API, MCP, admin tooling, CLI workflows, automation systems, and future agent surfaces while still running through WooCommerce permission checks.

That pattern is now expanding beyond WooCommerce core. Read-only abilities have started landing across several WooCommerce extensions, giving tools a consistent way to inspect extension-owned data such as gift cards, add-ons, subscriptions, payment details, shipping settings, automation workflows, and marketing status.

The extension rollout spans merchandising, rules, subscriptions, payments, shipping, automation, and marketing.

The WooCommerce Extension Abilities playbook

To help accelerate the implementation of an initial set of abilities across various WooCommerce extensions, we iterated on an agent skill which extracts the scaffolding, auditing, and harnesses to ensure base security into something any plugin author in the ecosystem can use for agent assisted ability creation.

The extraction now lives in two repositories:

• WordPress/agent-skills — portable WordPress-core layer. Three skills: wp-abilities-api (mechanics + the grouping heuristic), wp-abilities-audit (enumerate plugin functionality, capability gates, and propose abilities in coherent clusters), wp-abilities-verify (static + runtime correctness checks, including the readonly-but-writes detector).
• woocommerce/agent-skills — the WooCommerce-extension overlay. Sibling to the upstream repo, same tooling, narrower job. Ships the abilities-api-implement skill: the end-to-end playbook for registering abilities in a Woo extension — audit precondition, Domain class shape, loader-only registrar, paginated output envelope, in-plugin contract tests, and the WC 10.9 dependency boundary.

If you’re building a WooCommerce extension and want abilities in it, install both. If the plugin doesn’t have a WooCommerce dependency, the first repo is enough.

git clone git@github.com:woocommerce/agent-skills.git
cd agent-skills
node shared/scripts/skillpack-build.mjs --clean
node shared/scripts/skillpack-install.mjs \
  --dest=/path/to/your/wc-extension \
  --targets=claude,codex,cursor

That drops the skill files into .claude/skills/, .codex/skills/, or .cursor/skills/, depending on which AI assistant you use. Open the project, ask it to register Abilities API capabilities, and it loads the skill, runs the audit, proposes the Domain classes, scaffolds the registrar, gated on the right checks at each step.

Available WooCommerce extension abilities

The merged work below should be read as expected availability, not as a release announcement. Availability is estimated from merged PRs and current release tags; each extension changelog remains the final source.

The extension pattern

For this extension pass, the abilities are intentionally read-only. The ability runtime uses extension services, data stores, and domain helpers where possible.

For discoverability, these abilities use the same metadata shape as the WooCommerce 10.9 abilities: REST visibility, shared MCP metadata where appropriate, and accurate annotations for read-only and idempotent behavior.

Abilities that opt into REST and MCP discovery do not bypass WordPress or extension permissions. Execution still runs each ability’s permission callback, typically requiring a store-management or admin capability.

Looking ahead

WooCommerce 10.9 abilities covered core product and order operations. The extension work expands that pattern into active extension domains: gift cards, add-ons, purchase rules, product composition, recommendations, subscriptions, payments, shipping, tracking, marketing, and automation.

This is not the finished extension ability surface. It is a broader initial pass at making extension-owned WooCommerce operations discoverable, permission-checked, and consistent across supported tool surfaces. Over time, I expect we’ll expand with additional abilities as needs become known.