Make your store readable—and shoppable—by AI agents

The shift most merchants have not prepared for

Shopping is no longer only a human activity. Customers already ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and in-app assistants to compare products, check availability, and recommend what to buy. Those agents do not browse your theme the way a person does. They look for structured signals: clear product fields, machine-readable policies, stable APIs, and—when available—semantic meaning rather than exact keyword matches.

Most WooCommerce stores were built for browsers and search engines, not for agents. Category pages are HTML. Filters live in JavaScript. Checkout depends on cookies and sessions. An agent that can only scrape pages will invent details, miss stock status, or abandon the flow entirely. The result is invisible lost demand: the customer’s assistant never surfaces your product, or surfaces a competitor who is easier to parse.

WooCommerce AI Commerce exists to close that gap. It turns a standard WooCommerce catalog into an AI-accessible commerce surface—starting with free discovery for every store, and extending to full agent-ready workflows for merchants who need search, tooling, and checkout handoff.

Two layers: discovery first, then commerce

The product is split deliberately so stores can adopt AI readiness without locking core discovery behind a paywall.

Lite (free) answers a simple question: Can an agent find and read my catalog?
It publishes llms.txt, exposes a public product API under /wp-json/ai/v1, and offers keyword search. No external AI account is required. No embeddings job. Activate the plugin, and published products are immediately available as JSON. Rate limiting and cache headers protect the endpoints while remaining friendly to legitimate clients.

Pro answers the next question: Can an agent understand intent, act on the catalog, and help complete a purchase?
It adds semantic and hybrid search, AI-generated product intelligence, WordPress Abilities exposed through the official MCP Adapter, and guest checkout links so an agent can prepare a cart and hand the customer a secure WooCommerce checkout URL. Payment stays inside WooCommerce and your existing gateways.

This split is intentional. Discovery should be free so the ecosystem can index stores. Conversion-oriented agent capabilities are the commercial layer.

What Lite delivers on day one

After installation and activation (with WooCommerce active), Lite provides:

1. llms.txt
A living document at /llms.txt that describes the store, key category links, policy pages when they exist, and the exact API base URL. Agents that already look for llms.txt get a reliable map instead of guessing from HTML. The file can be regenerated from the admin and, where permissions allow, written to the site root.

2. Public catalog API

GET /wp-json/ai/v1/products — paginated list of published products
GET /wp-json/ai/v1/products/{id} — single product detail, including variations when applicable
GET /wp-json/ai/v1/search?q= — keyword search across the catalog

Responses include the fields agents actually need: name, price, stock status, categories, short and full description (plain text truncated by default, full HTML on request), image URL, ratings, and permalinks. No API key is required for read-only access, which matches how many agent runtimes prefer to explore.

3. Operational guardrails
Configurable per-IP rate limits return HTTP 429 with Retry-After. Successful GET responses can send public Cache-Control headers. The design assumes agents will crawl; it does not assume unlimited traffic.

Lite does not call OpenAI, Ollama, or any LLM. It only reshapes data you already have in WooCommerce. That keeps hosting simple, shared environments viable, and WordPress.org guidelines easy to satisfy.

What Pro adds when you are ready

Pro is built for merchants who want agents to go beyond “list products” into “find the right product” and “start checkout.”

Semantic and hybrid search
Customers do not always type SKUs or exact titles. They say something to keep my dog visible when walking at night. Pro embeds product meaning—name, summary, features, benefits, use cases, semantic keywords—and ranks results with cosine similarity, merged with classic keyword relevance. Minimum score thresholds reduce irrelevant matches so agents are not flooded with weak results.

AI product data engine
Using your configured provider (including local Ollama), Pro generates structured fields: summary, features, benefits, use cases, target users, problems solved, customer intents, and evidence grounded in the product source. Data is stored in dedicated tables, separate from WooCommerce core fields, so regenerations and rollbacks stay controlled. Embeddings are produced after AI data is ready, so search quality tracks content quality.

WordPress Abilities and MCP
Pro registers abilities such as search products, get product, check inventory, cart operations, and prepare checkout. These are exposed through the shared WordPress MCP Adapter—not a proprietary MCP server—so compatible clients can discover tools in a standard way. The architecture follows current WooCommerce guidance: client → MCP Adapter → Abilities API → plugin services → WooCommerce core.

Guest checkout links
Agents can validate items and receive a short-lived, single-use link. Opening the link adds those items to the visitor’s own cart and continues to native WooCommerce checkout. You keep payment methods, tax, shipping, and compliance inside the stack you already trust.

Together, these features move the store from “scrapable” to “operable by agents,” without replacing WooCommerce as the system of record.

Who it is for

Merchants and agencies who sell through WooCommerce and want visibility as AI-assisted shopping grows. Pet supplies, electronics, apparel, specialty retail, and digital-adjacent catalogs all benefit when long-tail natural language queries resolve to the right SKU.

Technical store owners who already run local or remote LLMs and want embeddings and generation under their control, including Ollama-based setups.

Teams preparing for MCP-capable clients who need stable abilities and a clear handoff to checkout rather than brittle browser automation.

It is not a generic chatbot theme, a replacement for WooCommerce REST, or a marketplace. It is infrastructure that makes your catalog legible and actionable to machines that shop on behalf of people.

Design principles

WooCommerce stays canonical. Products, stock, prices, carts, and orders remain in WooCommerce. The plugin adds parallel AI-oriented storage and APIs; it does not fork commerce logic.

Graceful degradation. Keyword search works without embeddings. Lite works without Pro. Pro’s search continues if an LLM is temporarily unavailable, falling back to keyword paths where appropriate.

Honesty to agents. Prompts and validators emphasize grounded claims from product source data. Descriptions can be truncated by default so responses stay dense and scannable. Rate limits and clear error codes teach clients how to behave.

Upgrade without dead ends. Lite teaches the same /ai/v1 discovery surface that Pro extends. Merchants who start free do not throw away agent habits or documentation when they enable semantic search and MCP later. (Only one edition should be active on a site at a time to avoid route conflicts.)

Practical outcomes

With Lite alone, an agent can:

Discover the store via llms.txt
List and filter published products
Open a product by ID
Run keyword search and return stable JSON

With Pro, the same agent can additionally:

Resolve natural-language intent to relevant products
Use structured AI fields instead of parsing long HTML
Call abilities for inventory and cart operations
Hand the shopper a checkout link that lands in your normal payment flow

For the merchant, that means fewer missed recommendations, fewer hallucinated product claims in third-party answers, and a path from “AI mentioned us” to “AI helped complete the order.”

Implementation posture

Lite is intentionally small: discovery, public read APIs, admin settings, and protection headers. It is suitable for shared hosting and for distribution on WordPress.org as a traffic and trust funnel.

Pro is the full commerce layer: generation jobs, embedding storage, search scoring, abilities, checkout-link service, and diagnostics. It expects a configured AI provider when you use generation and semantic search, and benefits from Action Scheduler for background work.

Both editions assume a modern WordPress and an active WooCommerce installation. Neither replaces your payment gateway, shipping plugins, or theme.

Getting started

Install and activate WooCommerce AI Commerce Lite.
Confirm WooCommerce is active and products are published.
Open WooCommerce → AI Commerce Lite to copy endpoint URLs and regenerate llms.txt.
Test with simple HTTP requests: list products, fetch one ID, search by keyword.
When you need natural-language search, MCP tools, or agent checkout, move to Pro, disable Lite on that site, and configure your AI provider and bulk generation for priority products.

From the first successful GET /wp-json/ai/v1/products response, your catalog is no longer only a website. It is a structured surface that agents can read. With Pro, it becomes a surface they can shop.

WooCommerce AI Commerce — free discovery for every store; agent-ready commerce when you need it.
Lite for visibility. Pro for intent, tools, and checkout handoff. Built on WooCommerce, not around it.

per year