A WooCommerce MCP connector: run your shop from Claude or ChatGPT

A WooCommerce shop holds everything that matters — products, stock, orders, customers — but to actually ask it something you open the WP admin, click through filters and export a CSV. What if you could just ask in plain language: "which products are low on stock?", "how did last week's orders look?", "rewrite this product's description"?

So I built a WooCommerce MCP connector for a production shop — a self-hosted server that plugs the shop straight into Claude.ai and ChatGPT. You ask, the AI queries the real shop over WooCommerce's own API, and answers. No CSV detour, no third-party SaaS sitting on your order data.

What it is

It's a custom MCP server, shipped as its own WordPress plugin. It exposes the shop's data as a set of typed tools the AI can call — backed by the official WooCommerce REST API, running inside the shop itself. Nothing leaves your server except the answer to the question you asked.

I deliberately built it as my own plugin rather than using an off-the-shelf one (e.g. Royal MCP): the off-the-shelf route meant vendor lock-in and no clean hook to add my own custom tools. A ~200-line plugin I own beats a black box I can't extend.

What it can do

10 tools — 8 read, 2 write:

• Read (8): list and search products, pull a single product, list and search orders, open a single order, look up customers, read stock levels and sales figures. All real server-side queries, not "load everything and filter in memory".
• Write (2): edit product data — e.g. rewrite a product description — each gated behind an explicit confirm step before anything changes.

So in practice: "Show me orders from yesterday over €200." "Which products in the spices category are out of stock?" "Tighten up this product description and, once I confirm, save it."

Connect it in Claude.ai AND ChatGPT

This is the part most WooCommerce-AI integrations get wrong. The connector speaks plain MCP, so it isn't tied to one assistant — it adds cleanly to both Claude.ai and ChatGPT as a custom connector.

The trick that makes ChatGPT work is the auth layer: OAuth 2.0 with PKCE and Dynamic Client Registration (DCR). DCR lets ChatGPT register itself as a client on the fly, so you don't hand-configure credentials — you just paste the connector URL, log in once, and it's connected. The same endpoint serves Claude.ai through the normal "add custom connector" flow.

Safe by default

A tool that can change live shop data needs guard rails:

• Read tools are marked read-only (readOnlyHint), so the assistant can run them without a prompt every time — fast, low-friction querying.
• Write tools require an explicit confirm — a single confirm flag the model has to set, so nothing is edited by accident.
• Every call is written to an audit log, and a rate limit sits in front of the endpoint. You can always see what the AI did, and it can't hammer the shop.

What you need

• A WooCommerce / WordPress shop you can install a plugin on
• The plugin itself (the MCP server + OAuth endpoints live inside it)
• An HTTPS endpoint (nginx in front, TLS cert) — MCP connectors require it
• That's it: no separate service, no database of its own, no order data copied anywhere

Why it matters

The shop's data is already yours. This just removes the friction between you and it: instead of clicking through WP admin, you ask — in Claude or ChatGPT — and act on the answer. Because it's a small plugin you own, you can add a tool the day you need one (a sales report, a coupon creator, an inventory nudge) instead of waiting for a vendor's roadmap.

Off-the-shelf shop AI is a black box. Your own connector is a few hundred lines you understand — and it works with whichever assistant you already use.