Universal Commerce Protocol: getting WooCommerce ready for AI agents

What I ship

• Audit of the existing WooCommerce or WordPress catalogue for agent-readability, including the current state of REST endpoints at /wp-json/wc/v3/ and any structured data already present.
• Schema.org enrichment per product, covering Product, Offer and AggregateOffer with hasMerchantReturnPolicy, ItemAvailability and PriceSpecification. The output is JSON-LD on the page and validated against schema.org.
• Optional Model Context Protocol server exposing catalogue and order intent endpoints to authenticated agent clients, sitting alongside the WordPress REST API rather than replacing it.
• Test harness wired to the Anthropic Claude API that exercises the agent flow end to end, from product lookup through order intent, with recorded transcripts as the regression baseline.
• Observability that separates agent traffic from human traffic at the analytics layer, so attribution, conversion and cost can be reported per audience type.

Why this is not just another schema.org tweak

AI agents are starting to behave like buyers. Browser-resident assistants and agent surfaces inside Claude and ChatGPT increasingly act on behalf of users: filtering, comparing, eventually committing to a transaction. The interface they need is not the visual page; it is a machine-readable surface for the catalogue and the transactional flow on top of it.

Schema.org Product, Offer and AggregateOffer cover the description side. They tell an agent what a product is, what it costs, whether it is in stock and what return policy applies. They do not describe how an agent should authenticate, how it should signal intent to buy, or how the store should respond when many agents query inventory simultaneously. That is the gap converging standards are addressing.

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, first published in November 2024 as an open specification, is one of the moves toward agent-readable interfaces. Automattic's position post on 2026-04-21, framing WordPress as a candidate operating system for agent-readable websites, points in the same direction from the CMS side. The practical conclusion: a catalogue legible only to humans is being repriced by the market.

Who this is for

• WooCommerce stores where agent-driven traffic is already showing up in logs and the catalogue is not built to answer it.
• B2B catalogues with quote workflows, regional pricing and subscription products, where a typed agent surface beats fragile screen-scraping.
• Content sites with affiliate commerce, where the page is the catalogue and agent-readable Offers determine whether the site is cited or skipped.
• Multi-region brands with one CMS feeding many storefronts, who need a single source of truth that agents can resolve consistently across locales.

Engagement model

Senior B2B contracts on EU jurisdiction. Discovery, scoping, fixed-scope or time-and-materials engagements. Scope and pricing are individual per project; I do not publish standard rate cards because the audit step usually changes the cost of the build.