Руководства
AI support assistant for your WooCommerce store
Create a read key in your store admin, let your mate learn the catalogue and policies, and give a signed-in customer answers about their own orders.
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Busymate AI reaches a WooCommerce store through the store's own REST API: the catalogue, categories, shipping zones and policy pages become content your mate answers from, and a signed-in customer can ask where their order is. Nothing is installed inside WooCommerce for that — the connection is a read key you create in the store admin.
Every step below is proven against a real WooCommerce store, end to end, by a shopper in the widget.
Before you start
- A WooCommerce store on HTTPS with Settings → Permalinks set to anything but Plain: the REST routes live under
/wp-json/wc/v3/, and plain permalinks do not serve them. - An admin account on the store, to create the key.
- Your workspace open in the Console.
1. Create a read key
- In the store admin, open WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → REST API and choose Add key.
- Describe it so you recognize it later, pick the user it acts as, and set Permissions to Read.
- Generate it. The consumer key (
ck_…) and consumer secret (cs_…) are shown once — copy both before leaving that page.
Read is enough for everything here: a write key would let the assistant change orders and move money, so the connection does not ask for one.
2. Connect the store
Open Console → Connections and add the store with three values: the store address, the consumer key and the consumer secret. The secret is stored value-blind — afterwards the Console shows a hint, never the value.
It is verified before anything is saved: one call to GET /wp-json/wc/v3/system_status proves the site really runs WooCommerce, the credential authenticates, and the key reads more than a public resource. A failure is reported as a sentence, never saved as a row claiming to be connected.
Over MCP: connect_commerce, get_commerce_status and sync_commerce, each taking a kind of woocommerce.
3. Choose what it reads
Four corpora, and you pick the set:
- Products — name, price, stock state and description, each cited to its own permalink.
- Categories — the category archive a shopper can open.
- Shipping — the store's shipping zones.
- Policies — your WordPress pages for shipping, returns, refunds, privacy and terms, so the answer and the page a customer is pointed at stay the same text.
Products are bounded by a page limit you set, 1 to 50, default 20. It is the same knowledge pipeline as a website source or pasted text — see Teach your assistant your own content.
4. Let it re-read the store
The store is re-synced on a schedule you set — daily by default, hourly at most. A sync compares the newest edit time across products and pages against the last one seen; when nothing changed it is skipped and not one memory is rewritten. Sync now in the Console, or sync_commerce, forces a pass.
5. Order lookup for a signed-in customer
Order lookup is identity-gated: it answers only with the signed-in customer's own orders, and has no anonymous arm.
The match is made on your store's own customer id. The plugin signs the WordPress user id into the proof — exactly the customer a WooCommerce order carries — so the store filters on it directly, and no email or phone number crosses the browser. A storefront that signs customers in another way falls back to a verified email.
Ownership is checked again on every order returned: a filter you asked for is not a filter that was applied. An order number alone is a guessable integer, never sufficient.
What comes back: order number, status, the dates placed, paid and completed, the total, the shipping method, the items, and a tracking number when the store recorded one.
6. Put the chat on the storefront
One WordPress plugin does both jobs: it loads the chat on every storefront page and signs a short-lived proof of who is logged in, so order lookup needs no second sign-in. Your customer database is never shared.
- Download the plugin from the store connection card in your Console; the zip is built for your workspace, so there is nothing to type into it.
- In wp-admin, open Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, upload the zip and activate it.
- Its status screen lists the values for Console → Identity and has a Test identity button that proves the signing endpoint answers.
Without the plugin the chat still works — add the embed script to your theme — but the storefront must then sign identity itself: Recognize signed-in customers.
Returns are answered, not started
The connection deliberately offers no start_return action. WooCommerce core has no customer-initiated return resource in its REST API, and POST /orders/<id>/refunds is an admin refund that moves a merchant's money — not something to run on a visitor's say-so. Returns are a plugin choice that differs per store.
So the assistant answers the returns policy from your own returns page, with a citation, and hands the conversation to a person for the rest.
Manage from any MCP client
Every step above is available from any MCP client on your own account:
claude mcp add --transport http busymate-ai https://busymate.ai/mcpTroubleshooting
- 401 — the key was refused: check the consumer key and secret, and that the key has Read permission.
- 404 — the address answers but the REST API is not there: WooCommerce is not active, or Settings → Permalinks is still Plain.
- Unreachable — the address is wrong or the store is down. The connect reports the status it saw.
Verify
- The Console card shows the store name, the WooCommerce version and the currency read at connect.
- Ask about a product only your catalogue knows. The reply cites the product's own page.
- Ask about your returns policy. The reply cites the returns page and offers a person rather than starting a return.
- Sign a test customer in and ask where their order is: the reply names that customer's orders only. Ask signed out and the assistant asks them to sign in.
Next
- Teach your assistant your own content — help pages beside the catalogue.
- Recognize signed-in customers — the proof order lookup relies on.
- Set up human handoff — staff the Inbox before the returns questions.
Вопросы
Does the key need Write permission?
No. Read covers the catalogue, the policies and order lookup. Write access is never asked for, because everything it would unlock moves a merchant's money.
Can a shopper see somebody else's order?
No. The lookup runs only for a signed-in customer, is scoped to that customer's own key, and re-checks ownership on every row before showing it. There is no search-all-orders path.
How often does it re-read my catalogue?
On the schedule you set — daily by default, hourly at most. An unchanged store is skipped, so re-syncing a quiet catalogue costs nothing.
Do I need the plugin?
Only to hand over who is signed in. The chat can go on the site with the embed script; the plugin saves you signing the proof by hand.