by Zologic | 2026-02-24 18:21:16+00:00
A few weeks ago, an AI agent browsed a WooCommerce store, built a cart, generated a checkout URL, and a human clicked that link and bought a perfume. The order appeared in WooCommerce like any other. Except it wasn't.
I'm a developer from the Netherlands. This is a side project that turned into something I didn't expect.

WooCommerce powers roughly 36% of online stores. But every AI shopping integration announcement was Shopify + Stripe + OpenAI. WooCommerce merchants were invisible to agents — no structured way to discover products, check stock, or generate a checkout link.
I built UCPReady to fix that. It's a WooCommerce plugin implementing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) — an open standard that gives AI agents a machine-readable commerce interface. One plugin, and your store gets a /.well-known/ucp manifest, three transport layers (REST, MCP, embedded checkout), and a native analytics dashboard.

How the flow actually works
An agent reads your manifest, searches products, resolves variants, builds a cart, and generates a delegated checkout URL. It hands that URL to the user. The user clicks, pays on your own WooCommerce checkout, through your existing gateway. The AI handles discovery and intent. The human handles payment.

The first real purchase
It happened on a Saturday night while I was debugging simultaneously with Ben Fisher, who built UCP Playground. We'd been patching bugs on both sides for hours — a Content-Type injection issue, an MCP dispatcher problem, a rate limiter blocking his IP.
At 00:59 I messaged him: "it just worked. Full funnel. Agent searched, created a checkout session, I clicked the link and completed the purchase. Order is live in WooCommerce."
We'd both been awake about 20 hours.

What the analytics show across two live stores:

308 unique AI agent sessions
29 distinct agents identified
668 total endpoint requests
3 attributed orders
€66.55 in AI-attributed revenue

Small numbers. But the pattern is real — agents aren't just scanning manifests, they're calling product endpoints, building carts, and generating checkout URLs that convert. None of that was previously visible inside WooCommerce.

What we learned about model behavior
Variant resolution is where most agents fail. The ones that reach checkout consistently call get_product_details to resolve variant IDs before carting. Those that skip this step guess, hit type errors, and drop off. In 180 sessions across 11 models, Llama 3.3 70B called the details endpoint at 2x the rate of GPT-4o and reached checkout at 3x the rate.
Schema quality predicts success more than model capability. A store with clean, consistent schemas performs well across all models. A store with ambiguous schemas fails across all models. The implementation matters more than which LLM is shopping it.
Attribution is harder than conversion. Most revenue shows as "Unknown Agent" because the delegated checkout flow means the final session is a normal browser request — the AI's identity doesn't carry through to the order. Signed session tokens are next on the roadmap.

UCPReady is in WooCommerce Marketplace business review. It passed all 11 automated tests. Whether it gets approved or not, the stores are live and the agents are shopping.
If you're building on UCP or thinking about the merchant side of agentic commerce, I'd like to hear what you're seeing.