From Found to Bought: Get your store ready to sell with AI

Letting an AI agent find your products is just the beginning. The real goal is to ensure that the discovery leads to a completed sale.

A customer’s AI assistant can read your catalog, compare your products, and decide yours is the best match, but none of that will turn into a sale if the agent can’t confirm the item is in stock, make sure it ships on time, and complete the purchase.

In just a few steps, your store will be ready for AI-powered shopping. The industry settles for a small number of protocols that allow agents to find products, check inventory, confirm shipment, and complete a purchase. You don’t have to be a developer; you just need to know what each protocol does for your store and what to implement so you’re ready when it arrives.

Here we’ll show you how to close the gap between discovery and conversion so you can make agency sales on your terms.

It helps to treat each protocol as another sales channel rather than a competing standard to bet on. For example, you already accept Visa, Mastercard and American Express without having to choose between them; each reaches a different group of customers. AI protocols work the same way.

Supporting one brings you to shoppers in one place, while supporting another brings you to shoppers in another. Neither of them asks you to pick a winner.

That’s important because these protocols can be divided into two groups, and only one of them is something consumers encounter today.

Two of these work under the hood, connecting AI to the way your store runs. The other are the channels that bring your products to the attention of shoppers. This is what everyone is doing and where it stands today.

Protocol	Where it works	What it does	Where it stands today
MCP (Model Context Protocol)	Behind the scenes	A common way for AI assistants to connect to a store and work with its live data.	Delivered in WooCommerce 10.3 and still in early release. Right now, it helps AI assistants manage a store (find, add, and update products and orders), not charge customers. Woo plans to expand it to shopping as the technology matures.
Capabilities API	Behind the scenes	Tells an AI agent what a site can do, so it knows what actions to take.	Built into WordPress. WooCommerce uses it to provide actions such as searching for products, looking up orders, and creating orders. As more extensions add their own, agents can do more.
ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)	Customer-oriented	Developed by OpenAI and Stripe. It allows AI agents to bring up your products, add them to cart, and complete the purchase in an assistant like Copilot. The sale is closed in the assistant, while the customer, the order and the fulfillment remain with your store.	Shoppers discover and purchase your products through AI agents, and the customer and catalog remain yours. It is an open standard that connects your product catalog to multiple AI agents through the Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite. Depending on the agent, shoppers pay directly to the agent or are directed to your store to complete the purchase. This is now being rolled out to US companies, with more agents coming online as pilots open up.
UCP (Universal Trade Protocol)	Customer-oriented	UCP is an open standard supported by a group of companies, with Google being the first to launch it for AI products such as Gemini and AI Mode in Search.	Construction is still going on. Google’s version runs on Google Merchant Center and uses your structured product data. Get your feed ready now and you’ll be ready to sell on Google’s AI platforms as soon as access opens up, with more AI tools expected to follow the same standard over time.

Woo is responsible for building the pieces behind the scenes, so all you have to do is stay on the current version and keep your data clean. Woo is rolling out these protocols for select groups of sellers, so stay tuned for more news on seller access and requirements.

The key is to keep your store’s data accurate and up to date. When an agent responds to a customer, they are making a promise on your behalf, so the information behind that promise must be accurate. You can get there in five steps.

Update your inventory count in real time. This is important for both agents and customers. If it tells a customer something is available when it was actually sold out that morning, your store is making a promise it can’t keep. Your inventory needs to be reported in real time, from one reliable source.

Include shipping and returns information on your product pages. Keep track of delivery estimates, shipping options, and return policies where the product information resides. Agents need to be able to quickly find answers to customer questions, such as, “Can I get this on Friday?” or “What is the return period?”

Install Stripe for WooCommerce just once: it’s your route to ACP. With Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite, one implementation is enough to find and purchase your products through various AI assistants (such as Copilot or Gemini). Shoppers buy products with the AI assistant, but that still happens your customers. Stripe takes care of payments and fraud protection, and you keep your catalog, your customers, and control of your store. One caveat: this works specifically through the Stripe extension, so stores with WooPayments (which are powered by Stripe) can’t use it yet.

Send your product feed to Google Merchant Center. The Google for WooCommerce extension does this for you. A clean Merchant Center feed is the foundation for UCP and for display in Google’s AI shopping tools, including Gemini and AI Mode in Search. Setting it up now means you’ll be ready as UCP matures, rather than playing catch-up later.

Check your data every quarter. AI visibility is something you should keep an eye on. Search your products quarterly in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, both by name and how a customer would describe them. Wherever your data is wrong, outdated or missing, fix it. Stores that update their information regularly will experience the most success.

Woo also tests OpenAI’s Product Feed Spec and other new standards to help you stay ahead. Stores with clean, well-organized product data pick them all up faster because the hard part has already been done. The Agentic Commerce Hub is the place to follow as new features emerge.

All of this is only as good as the platform it’s on. On a closed platform, you are dependent on that vendor’s decisions about which protocols to support and when. If they don’t build for a particular AI platform, your store will remain outside of that channel until they do, and you have no control over the timing.

Because WooCommerce is open source, your store works with open standards and you can quickly adopt new protocols without having to wait on one company’s timeline. You connect your catalog once and reach customers through whatever agent they use, instead of having to rebuild them for each new platform.

Check how often your inventory is synced. If it’s updated daily, see the real-time options before agents start checking your inventory.
Open one of your best-selling product pages and check that the shipping estimates and return policies are right there in the product details, and not just on a separate policy page.
If you haven’t already connected Stripe for WooCommerce, install it and view the path to the Agentic Commerce Suite. If so, check to see if you are on the waitlist for the agent positions.
If you haven’t already done so, sync your catalog with Google Merchant Center through Google for WooCommerce.

Imagine a specialized outdoor store running on WooCommerce. The inventory reports in real time, each product page includes shipping and returns policies, and the catalog flows into both the Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite and Google Merchant Center. A customer asks an AI assistant to put together a three-season backpacking system that ships in a week and stays on budget. The agent checks inventory, confirms the delivery window against the store’s shipping information, and recommends the tent, pack, and layers as a set. The customer can then make the purchase directly in the assistant or complete the transaction on the merchant’s site.

The agent passes by a competing store that only updates inventory overnight, maintains shipping terms on a separate policy page, and cannot make these guarantees. Even if you have similar products, the outcome is different because your store is ready for it.