What's Possible with WooCommerce MCP w Nik McLaughlin

What's Possible with WooCommerce MCP w/ Nik McLaughlin 🔗 **Source:** [What's Possible with WooCommerce MCP w/ Nik McLaughlin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4lQgflIgjU) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [woocommerce, mcp, ai-integration] > author: Webmasters FM > source: YouTube > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4lQgflIgjU > date created: 2025-01-26 22:00 > > # 🏷️ Title: What's Possible with WooCommerce MCP w/ Nik McLaughlin >  ## 🧰 Action Inbox - [H1] Explore MCP setup for local WooCommerce sites — technical implementation #development - [H2] Evaluate privacy implications of AI store management — data security concerns #security - [H3] Test local vs cloud AI models for e-commerce — performance comparison #testing ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - [SkyVerge](https://skyverge.com) - [WooCommerce Community Slack](https://woocommerce.com/community-slack/) ## 📝 Summary - Nik McLaughlin from SkyVerge/GoDaddy explores WooCommerce MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration - MCP enables AI agents to interact directly with WooCommerce stores through natural language - Current limitations include complex setup, context window constraints, and reliability issues - Local AI models offer privacy benefits but with reduced capability compared to cloud solutions - Technology shows promise for streamlining e-commerce management but needs simplified implementation ## 📖 Main Content MCP (Model Context Protocol) represents an open standard allowing large language models to interact with applications beyond simple text responses. For WooCommerce, this means merchants can manage their stores through natural language conversations rather than traditional admin interfaces. The technology enables store management tasks like checking inventory, processing orders, and updating products through chat interfaces. However, implementation currently requires technical expertise and multiple configuration steps that limit broader adoption. Privacy concerns around customer data processing favor local AI models, though these currently offer reduced capabilities compared to cloud-based solutions. The WordPress ecosystem's diversity of hosting environments and technical skill levels presents unique challenges for standardized MCP deployment. ## 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:00](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=0) — [H1] Introduction and Background - Key idea: Nik McLaughlin leads product and brand management at SkyVerge/GoDaddy - Evidence: "SkyVerge specifically focuses on WooCommerce extensions with suite of 40 extensions" #### ⏱️ [02:30](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=150) — [H2] AI as Opportunity vs Threat - Key idea: Focus on opportunities rather than doomsday scenarios for AI in WordPress - Evidence: "We have a say in what gets developed and how these tools develop because it's still in progress" #### ⏱️ [04:15](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=255) — [H3] Mobile Revolution Comparison - Key idea: AI transformation parallels mobile internet's impact on web development - Evidence: "Mobile change is maybe the best comparison for understanding what kind of scale of change" #### ⏱️ [06:45](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=405) — [H1] MCP Fundamentals - Key idea: MCP is the open standard for how LLMs can perform actions beyond text responses - Evidence: "MCP enables all of the apps to interop between each other in one interface" #### ⏱️ [09:20](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=560) — [H2] WooCommerce MCP Implementation - Key idea: Basic store management tasks work through natural language interface - Evidence: "Anything you can do through the admin, you can kind of do through a chat bot instead" #### ⏱️ [12:10](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=730) — [H2] Local AI Models Exploration - Key idea: Testing local models addresses privacy concerns but with current limitations - Evidence: "Running LLM models locally on a MacBook Air, not relying on cloud provider at all" #### ⏱️ [14:30](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=870) — [H3] Setup Complexity Challenges - Key idea: Current setup process requires extensive technical configuration - Evidence: "Ended up being like a thousand words or more of getting all of the pieces in place" #### ⏱️ [16:45](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1005) — [H2] Safety and Access Control - Key idea: Non-deterministic AI agents require careful permission boundaries - Evidence: "Built into anything you can do in the WP admin you can do via chat bot" #### ⏱️ [19:20](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1160) — [H3] Privacy and Data Control - Key idea: Local models provide data control benefits for e-commerce applications - Evidence: "WooCommerce folks have expectation of owning their data and owning everything already" #### ⏱️ [22:15](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1335) — [H2] Context Window Limitations - Key idea: Large data volumes and tool schemas consume available context space - Evidence: "Even MCP itself, exposing the tools and schemas, can eat up a lot of context" #### ⏱️ [25:30](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1530) — [H1] Priority Improvements Needed - Key idea: Simplified setup and better client experience are top priorities - Evidence: "Making it completely dead simple to set these things up and get them running" #### ⏱️ [28:10](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1690) — [H2] WordPress Ecosystem Complexity - Key idea: WordPress's diverse hosting and technical landscape complicates standardization - Evidence: "There's never one way to do something in WordPress - hosting companies, core, plugins" #### ⏱️ [31:45](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1905) — [H1] Future Integration Potential - Key idea: MCP's value emerges when connecting multiple services in unified interface - Evidence: "Single MCP client to work on WooCommerce that can also interact with MailChimp" ## 📚 References - [SkyVerge WooCommerce Extensions](https://skyverge.com) - [WooCommerce Community Slack](https://woocommerce.com/community-slack/) - [MCP Protocol Documentation](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - MCP creates a standardized way for AI to interact with WooCommerce stores through natural conversation rather than traditional admin interfaces - Local AI models offer privacy advantages for sensitive e-commerce data but currently lack the power of cloud-based alternatives - The main barriers to adoption are complex technical setup requirements and the need for simplified implementation tools ## 📰 Newsletter **AI Meets E-commerce: WooCommerce MCP Opens New Possibilities** The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is bringing AI-powered store management to WooCommerce, allowing merchants to handle inventory, orders, and product updates through simple conversations. While the technology shows tremendous promise for streamlining e-commerce workflows, current implementations require significant technical expertise. Key benefits include natural language interaction with store data and the potential for local AI processing to address privacy concerns. However, challenges around setup complexity and context limitations need resolution before broader adoption. For WordPress developers interested in AI integration, this represents an emerging opportunity to build user-friendly tools that bridge the gap between powerful AI capabilities and everyday merchant needs. Resources: [Learn WordPress](https://learn.wordpress.org/), [Developer Docs](https://developer.wordpress.org/), [WP-CLI](https://wp-cli.org/) ## ✅ Action Items #### WordPress - Core AI: MCP integration exploration, guardrails for e-commerce data - Community: MCP education materials, best practices documentation - Documentation: MCP setup guides, security considerations - Plugins: Simplified MCP server implementations, hosting integration - Hosting: MCP support standardization, privacy-first solutions ## 🧪 Hypotheses - Local AI models will become viable alternatives to cloud solutions for e-commerce within 18 months - MCP adoption in WordPress will require hosting provider integration rather than individual merchant setup - Privacy concerns will drive demand for local AI processing in e-commerce applications - Simplified setup tools will be the primary factor determining MCP adoption rates ### 📊 Methodology - Compare local vs cloud AI model performance on common WooCommerce tasks - Survey merchant privacy preferences and technical comfort levels - Test MCP setup complexity across different hosting environments - Analyze context window usage patterns in e-commerce AI interactions ### ❓ Questions - How will WordPress hosting providers standardize MCP support across diverse technical environments? - What privacy regulations will emerge for AI processing of e-commerce customer data? - Which WooCommerce use cases provide the most compelling ROI for AI automation? ### 🔮 Future Research - Impact of local AI hardware advancement on e-commerce adoption rates - Integration patterns between MCP and existing WordPress workflow tools - Cross-platform MCP standardization efforts beyond WordPress ecosystem ### 💡 Implications - Practice: E-commerce developers need AI integration skills and privacy-first architectures - Policy: Data processing regulations may require local AI capabilities for compliance - Security: AI agent permissions require same access control principles as human users - Education: Merchant training needed for AI-assisted store management workflows - Funding: Investment opportunities in simplified MCP implementation tools ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment Reading level estimate: 12th grade #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: Technical concepts explained through analogies - Improve: MCP architecture diagrams, data flow visualizations #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: Conversational interview format with natural explanations - Improve: Audio-only version, technical term pronunciation guide #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: Clear definitions, mobile revolution analogy, real-world examples - Improve: Glossary of AI/MCP terminology, comparative explanations #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: References to hands-on setup experiences - Improve: Step-by-step MCP setup tutorial, interactive demos #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: Problem-solution structure, technical limitations clearly stated - Improve: Decision trees for local vs cloud AI, implementation timelines #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners - Present: Community Slack references, collaborative development discussion - Improve: Discussion prompts for WordPress meetups, peer setup sessions #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners - Present: Individual exploration examples, self-directed learning paths - Improve: Self-assessment checklist, independent project ideas #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners - Present: Ecosystem thinking about WordPress diversity - Improve: Technology evolution analogies, adaptation patterns ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment #### Screen reader semantics - Present: Clear heading structure, logical content flow - Improve: Explicit link descriptions, technical term definitions #### Keyboard navigation - Present: Standard video player controls - Improve: Transcript with timestamp navigation links #### Contrast and readability - Present: Text-based content with good contrast - Improve: Ensure video captions meet contrast standards #### Text resizing and reflow - Present: Responsive text layout - Improve: Video player responsiveness at high zoom levels #### Media and captions - Present: Full transcript provided - Improve: Time-synced captions, downloadable transcript #### Forms and interactions - Present: Simple video interface - Improve: Accessible video speed controls ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment #### Cultural breadth - Present: US-focused WordPress/WooCommerce context - Improve: Global e-commerce examples, international privacy perspectives #### Inclusive language - Present: Gender-neutral technical discussion - Improve: Plain-language alternatives for technical jargon #### Neurodiversity support - Present: Consistent interview structure, clear topic transitions - Improve: Visual breaks, summary sections for complex concepts #### Representation - Present: Two male voices in tech leadership roles - Improve: Diverse guest perspectives on AI impact #### Psychological safety - Present: Balanced view of AI opportunities and challenges - Improve: Acknowledgment of job displacement concerns ### ✅ Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - Deductive strength: Mobile revolution analogy effectively illustrates scale of AI transformation - Inductive strength: Privacy concerns logically lead to local AI model preference - Causal reasoning: Setup complexity directly impacts adoption rates - Analogical strength: AI assistant compared to human contractor for access control #### Fallacies - Appeal to novelty: Some enthusiasm for AI may overstate current capabilities - False dichotomy: Local vs cloud presented as binary choice rather than hybrid approaches #### Tone of voice - Overall tone: Cautiously optimistic, technically informed, practically focused ### 🛡️ DARVO Analysis - Deny: No denial patterns present - Attack: No attacks on critics or skeptics - Reverse victim/offender: Not applicable to technical discussion - Emotional cues: Balanced excitement about opportunities with acknowledgment of limitations ## 🎯 Conclusion MCP integration with WooCommerce represents a significant opportunity to transform e-commerce management through natural language interaction. While current technical barriers limit immediate adoption, the combination of privacy-conscious local AI models and simplified setup tools could unlock widespread merchant usage. The WordPress ecosystem's diversity requires thoughtful implementation strategies that accommodate varying technical capabilities and hosting environments. ## 🧱 Refactor Appendix ### 📚 Literature Split Pad Purpose: Stage CEE units that become Literature notes. Split level: H3 ### [H1] MCP enables natural language WooCommerce management > [!quote] What's Possible with WooCommerce MCP by Nik McLaughlin via Webmasters FM. Published 2025-01-26. > "Anything you can do through the admin, you can kind of do through a chat bot instead." Demonstrates core MCP value proposition for e-commerce workflows. [view highlight](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=560#H1) #xref #articleseed ID:rw_mcp_admin ### [H2] Local AI models provide privacy benefits > [!quote] What's Possible with WooCommerce MCP > "WooCommerce folks have expectation of owning their data and owning everything already." Privacy-first approach aligns with WordPress community values. [view highlight](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1160#H2) #xref ID:rw_privacy_local --- ### 🔖 Atomic Split Pad (Zettel Candidates) Purpose: Promote reusable claims into Atomic notes. Split level: H4 #### [Z1] Setup complexity limits MCP adoption - Technical barriers prevent mainstream merchant usage - Pointer to 14:30 timestamp discussion - Links: [[AI-Adoption-Barriers]] [[WordPress-Complexity]] #### [Z2] Context windows constrain AI agent capabilities - Tool schemas and data volumes consume available processing space - Pointer to 22:15 context limitation discussion - Links: [[AI-Limitations]] [[MCP-Technical-Constraints]] --- ### ✏️ Fleeting Queue Purpose: Capture quick actions for Fleeting notes. - [F1] Research N8n workflow automation for MCP comparison — context/meetup discussion #fleeting #inbox - [F2] Test local AI model performance on WooCommerce tasks — comparison study #fleeting #inbox - [F3] Document MCP setup process simpl --- ## Full Transcript [00:00] Welcome to Webmasters FM. [00:01] Today I have Nick from Skyverge. [00:03] Nick, how are you doing today? [00:04] Hey, you're doing good. [00:05] Thanks, Brian. [00:06] Maybe for people who don't know you or Skyverge, could you give like kind of a brief bio what you do, what you guys do over there? [00:13] sure. [00:14] Yeah, so I'm on the SkyVirge team at GoDaddy. [00:17] but SkyVirge specifically is a, it's focused on like WooCommerce extensions. [00:23] So we have a suite of, I think still 40 is our count right now, of WooCommerce extensions. [00:30] The biggest of those being like WooCommerce memberships. [00:34] And then, you know, the list goes on from there. [00:37] But yeah, so I've been with SkyVirge for about five years. [00:41] We got acquired by GoDaddy within that. [00:43] time and I've been kind of coming up through the ranks there but most recently doing mostly like product and brand management so get to go on shows and do talks and also like [00:55] figure out what we're building and things like that. [00:57] Nice, was your background development though? [00:59] Like did you work as a developer? [01:01] Yeah, so I started at Skyverge on the support team and [01:05] came up through that route and that's always been kind of my primary focus. [01:09] I think even like my engineering or product approach is very customer centric. [01:13] But I did like get half of a computer science degree and you know, spent some time kind of embedded with our engineering team and stuff like that. [01:22] So I kind of float around a lot, trying not to dilute my skills too much here, but also, you know, get the most out of perspective and customer insight and stuff like that [01:31] constantly. [01:31] way. [01:32] Nice. [01:32] I had a recent episode like late last year with Ian Meisner, who I think was at Skyverge, right? [01:38] old boss, yeah. [01:40] He, I was looking this morning and his was like the most listened to episode I've had in a long time or like just, you know, I haven't, I've only been doing this like a year, but it [01:48] was dramatically more. [01:51] the topic of that one was like, check out optimizations for black Friday. [01:55] So was like, okay, that's like a, pretty clear, like, I can understand why that one got a lot of traffic more than the other ones, but I feel like this topic today will probably [02:02] beat that one because this is really like the topic. [02:06] Yeah. [02:07] We, it'll be a competition. [02:09] And it's really, we want to deep dive into like MCP, think specifically and WooCommerce MCP, because you've been doing a lot of cool stuff and it's been fun like seeing a lot of [02:18] that conversation in our community Slack. [02:21] But I guess I wanted to start like a big picture. [02:24] What is your, if you like take a step back and you just look at like 2026 AI hitting us as product people in the WordPress space, do you have like, what's your like initial gut [02:35] reaction to what's happening? [02:37] Gut reaction, I... [02:40] don't know this is gut or if this is like a trained thing by this point. [02:43] Like we're far enough in it that maybe I've like calmed the nerves a little more, but I'm definitely like looking more for opportunities than I am for doomsday scenarios. [02:53] I think, yeah, I don't know. [02:54] Like I said, I think some of that might just be like training of like, okay, I've got my head around enough of this to like start to see those things. [03:01] But it's really like kind of shifting that focus of like a lot of the big players [03:05] pieces I think are landing as far as like what this tech will do and how it's going to be implemented and things like that. [03:11] And now it's more the time to actually build useful things with it. [03:16] There's still a lot of limitations I think on like what can be done there and how well these things actually work. [03:22] So I mean that's a lot of what I want to talk about too is like realistically what's what are the challenges still in front of us. [03:27] But I but I think the biggest encouragement I have from last year I think going into this year is [03:33] that because so much of this is still being developed or solidified that like it's an opportunity to decide how this goes. [03:41] Like we have a say in what gets developed and how these tools develop because it's still in progress. [03:49] Like based on what we build now, we kind of create demand for whatever comes next. [03:54] Yeah, and I, I mean, I definitely hit that roller coaster, like, or like pendulum of like existential dread to like, we're in the like, [04:02] massive opportunity I think of like maybe cell phones and like mobile internet as like the last big thing that hit web development where it was like this is like a whole new Avenue [04:12] of things that we get to imagine that we weren't possible before and changed and it had plenty of other effects on Society and culture, of course, you know uh But it definitely [04:22] was like if you're open to opportunity and you're excited about it It's kind of fun to get to see it happening in real time and not like I don't know how old you are but like [04:31] I remember early-ish internet, but not at the same level, but I feel like we get to see this at the really early stages, and we're getting to see it from the ground up. [04:40] Yeah, I think like the mobile like cell phone change is like maybe the best comparison that i've come across as far as understanding like what kind of scale of change and [04:51] Some of the mechanics of how things are changing too, like it's not so much, I mean, let's see, like on the, the term AI is too big, right? [05:00] Like, we all know this, so it's like, I want to say like on the AI side, but it's like, but that's every thing that anybody's talking about. [05:07] So what does that mean? [05:09] Like there's a lot of stuff going on on the, what computers can do, like, oh wow, all these new like things that we never knew computers could do or something, which is, you [05:18] know, sort of like the hardware of the mobile. [05:21] revolution, right? [05:22] Of like, wow, can, you know, like, whatever, it's got a GPS in it. [05:26] And now everybody just has a GPS in their pocket or whatever, right? [05:28] Like all these different pieces that we thought were that were really advanced tech at the time, you know, and now we've kind of become accustomed to. [05:35] But I, I guess, yeah, I think there's a lot more on the like, what are we going to do with it front right now? [05:42] uh That [05:44] that we have to kind of figure out like, okay, if this is a built-in that we like assume that these pieces of like that these features or something are possible, then. [05:54] then how does that change how we build everything else? [05:56] Like not everything needs a chat bot on it, but I think like the shift there is maybe like instead of adding a chat bot to all of our apps, it's like how do we build our apps for [06:08] the chat bot? [06:09] Like, and we're not trying to... [06:13] pull all these features into the things that exist. [06:14] It's like, no, the things that we're building are now going to appear in different ways. [06:18] And again, that's where I think like the mobile change is so good for web development. [06:23] It's like, yeah, we suddenly have to do responsive styling. [06:26] And then that goes beyond just like some CSS to move some divs around, but actually like rethinking that user interface and rethinking what interaction looks like. [06:35] um I'm such a huge like hover effect person. [06:39] love anytime a website has hover effects and I just have never [06:42] found it. [06:43] I know there's ways but like I've never really gotten a good mobile hover experience that I like. [06:48] Stuff like that and it's like okay this is like a little like interaction thing that we're used to that's now gonna look kind of different because of those sort of bigger [06:57] technological changes. [06:59] Yeah, I was talking to somebody on a different podcast and they were, it was, it was about like WooCommerce and, and, know, the WordPress and WooCommerce, the admin UI is a little, [07:09] you know, dated, like it's been there a while. [07:11] It's, it's tried and true, I guess is like a positive way to say it. [07:15] but one of the things that changed my mindset was the MCP approach where I was like, I'm not even like, I'm doing things with my WooCommerce store without even literally [07:27] looking at any of the user like I have no user interface. [07:30] The user interface is literally just me talking to something and things are happening and it's like such a foundational shift that it's hard to wrap our head around but maybe you [07:38] can kind of break down like if somebody is like I keep hearing MCP I keep hearing these kinds of concepts what's your maybe like quick explanation of like what it literally is or [07:50] you know what it doesn't have be super technical but like what exactly are we talking about when we say MCP? [07:55] yeah, I think like the the short version of like what is MCP is probably like MCP is the open standard for how LLMs can do things so LLM is maybe you know in the jargony side of [08:10] things but like it's how AI does things I bristle a lot at the terminology but [08:18] But yeah, it's like you have your chatbot that people are familiar with. [08:21] I was just talking to my hairstylist the other day about chat, his experience with chat GPT and how funny he interacts with that. [08:29] Anyways, so like people broadly know about it is the point, right? [08:32] So then to go from there to like, what is MCP? [08:35] MCP is like how you can actually do things in that experience beyond just getting a, know, text in, text out response. [08:42] And because it's an open standard, it's also beyond any specific API integration that had to be built. [08:49] uh [08:50] So to get the next level of that, I think the next level up explanation is that MCP enables all of the apps to interop between each other in one interface. [09:03] So that's where you get into the real magic of it is it's embedded in your client, like your chat client that you're talking with, that maybe has all this extra context about [09:15] either what you or what project you're working on or whatever it is. [09:18] trying to do and it takes that [09:22] and adds in these tools that let it do things from other services. [09:26] So you can now connect that to not just a project that you're working on, but, this thing's hosted on GitHub and they have an MCP server and I got the, we're both at [09:37] companies that are using management software and stuff, so I had to update the ticket in Jira and they have an MCP and all this stuff and you can do all of that from a single [09:47] interface. [09:48] Really similar to like you were saying with Woo in the WordPress. [09:52] admin, you don't really have to click around on all of the different places. [09:56] You can just type out what you want and see that happen. [09:59] And the MCP server, the MCP protocol really is the thing that allows that whole actual interactivity to happen between the application, whether that's WooCommerce or any other [10:12] huge list of them, and the LLM that's deciding what tools to use and things like that. [10:17] Yeah, and I think what's cool about it, like you were saying, like it's a protocol that kind of now that it's getting supported by all these different things, it kind of like [10:24] abstracts it all into one spot. [10:26] Like, do we think like one day we're going to have a chat bot that's like WordPress has its own chat in the side that you chat with? [10:32] Maybe, maybe you'll just open chat GPT and it'll connect your WordPress. [10:36] But in either case, like [10:37] If we can have an abstracted tool, then hopefully like we don't need to build each of those use cases and sit around and wait for them. [10:44] Hopefully this interactivity layer, you know, done through MCP can hopefully unlock. [10:50] I'm hoping like all of those things to just show up faster. [10:53] And it's like, Claude now supports it and chatgp now supports it. [10:56] And if we see other, you know, chat come out, I use Gemini a lot. [11:00] It's just going to make that kind of like transition a lot easier, but [11:04] In like practical terms, what are some of the things you've tried with MCP on WooCommerce and how good has it gotten for you? [11:15] like, how reliable has it been for you? [11:17] Like, what are some specifics? [11:19] Yeah, I mean it's definitely like... [11:20] I think mixed results at this point, like, but that's also maybe because I'm pushing the edges a lot more. [11:26] So then like trying to establish a solid base or something where somebody who's like maybe more on the agency side or something where they're like, you know, really trying to figure [11:35] out how they're to roll this out either for their own use or for their clients might be trying to really establish a core base. [11:41] like, I'm getting to play off in the weeds a little more. [11:44] So I don't know if my experience is necessarily like representative of. [11:48] all of what's possible with the tech. [11:51] But yeah, I've definitely hit some mixed results. [11:54] Some of the specifics, I mean, the basics are a lot of store management stuff, like we said, like being able to, anything you can do through the admin, you can kind of do [12:03] through a chat bot instead. [12:04] um So I've hooked up local WooCommerce sites to Cursor, to VS Code. [12:11] The docs have a whole bunch of stuff about setting up through Claude, so that's kind a well-worn path as well. [12:17] Yeah, so like wherever your kind of chat client lives and then within that context being able to ask about the latest orders on your site or make product changes and stuff like [12:29] that, right? [12:30] Or check inventory levels and doing all of that in like a natural language way where you just, just like you would ask somebody normally, you know, like you don't have to find the [12:39] right words for it. [12:40] You don't have to find the right menu for it. [12:42] You can just have the thought basically. [12:45] You know verbalize the thought and then you're kind of good and you can kind of get the the LLM does the magic of turning that into Tool calls to get all the information, right? [12:54] So Yeah, it's been a lot of a lot of those basic pieces I've I've played around mostly with like the Maybe like the implementation or like the technical side of that of like, [13:05] okay Can I do this like one? [13:07] Special interest of mine is with like running LLM models or [13:11] language models locally. [13:14] So like not relying on a cloud provider at all, but just having my own machine that runs. [13:19] And I'm doing this like on a laptop. [13:21] You know, I'm not like, I don't have a special server hiding in the back or something that has, know. [13:26] teraflops of GPUs or whatever sitting in it. [13:29] I'm just like, I've got my MacBook Air. [13:31] Because I'm interested in the real world use cases of if a merchant wants to interact with this tool on their site, there's going to be some real limitations around being able to [13:42] send that data off to a cloud provider or whatever. [13:45] So I played around a lot with that. [13:47] And that's where I've definitely seen a lot of maybe more of the limitations, both on the [13:51] Technological side, as far as like what a small model that can run on my laptop is capable of right now, there's a lot of room for improvement there and improvements are happening [14:02] there. [14:02] And then... [14:03] Also on the kind of integration layer, guess, where depending on exactly how you set that up, it can be very difficult to get running in the first place. [14:13] I had a blog post about this maybe a month or two ago now, just about just walking through how I set it up. [14:22] And I thought, oh yeah, this just be a quick couple line explainer. [14:25] And it ended up being like, I don't know, a thousand words or more of getting all of the pieces in place, because I realized how many [14:33] I was making about other things that I'd already had running on my machine or something that's like, right. [14:39] Well, yeah, you have to have that too. [14:40] And then you have to download this model and then you have to know where to find a model in the first place. [14:45] So there's a lot of pieces to tie together. [14:47] so I think the, addition to just like the model's getting more powerful, I think the, biggest like next piece for making a lot of this like more user friendly is, and just [14:59] usable in general is. [15:00] making it easier to get started, like making the setup a breeze. [15:05] And there's a lot of ways to simplify that, but yeah, I think that's gonna be a big next step for 2026, right? [15:13] I think it's nice that it's hard right now, because it's also a little dangerous. [15:17] Like it's a little dangerous to connect AI to say like a live WooCommerce store or something that important, but it's weird because normally this stuff comes to like [15:27] developers first and we get to like explore it for a long time before like the, you know, the normal people are aware of a technology, but this... [15:35] AI is very different. [15:36] Like you said, like your hairstylist, like my wife, everybody I know, like they're using like the consumer apps, like chat GPT and like, like they're, they're like not that far [15:45] behind. [15:45] And some of them in some ways are like almost like better at it in weird ways. [15:49] Cause they're just, they're not as technical. [15:51] it's like, they're almost like, it makes more sense to them. [15:54] So it's kind of weird cause it does feel like. [15:56] like, it's so hard and stuff, but it's like, well, maybe we need like that heavy barrier to entry until it's like this safe, reliable thing. [16:03] Because I have to assume there's probably some amount of danger letting, you know, a non-deterministic like agent just like mess around with your stuff. [16:11] Like there has to be some issues there. [16:13] I yeah, right like it's built into the anything you can do in the WP admin you can do via chat bot, right? [16:18] like so it's like and and then maybe I guess like the added layer of understanding of like MCP is the layer for the [16:28] language model to interact with your app, not for you to interact with your app, right? [16:33] So you're talking to the LLM. [16:35] The LLM then decides what tools to use, right? [16:38] So you can guide it. [16:40] And that's actually part of the setup trouble right now is sometimes you have to tell it how to use the MCP server or what tool to use or what schema or something. [16:49] obviously, that's not how we want these things to work. [16:51] But. [16:52] by building that abstraction layer all the way to the point of just natural language, like you do open up a lot of kind of in between of, you know, where... [17:01] Problems can arise in either interpretation of what you wanted Or like just flat out just execution. [17:07] That's just like you said non-deterministic. [17:09] Like you just don't know for sure what's gonna happen I think mcp builds a lot more determinism back into the system by like you get to the server developer gets to codify [17:21] What happens when the tool gets called and set a schema and permissions and like elicitations so like how to get more information [17:29] before you do something or in order to carry out a task. [17:32] So there's a little more process there. [17:35] It's like the API analogy kind of carries over in that sense that you're sort of defining an interaction. [17:42] a little bit more than just like, we'll see what the, know, like just pointing the LLM at a browser and seeing what buttons it clicks is like a whole other level of who knows [17:50] what's gonna happen. [17:51] So MCP at least like standardizes some of that from the developer side, but yeah, there's definitely like, we're still throwing an LLM in the middle of it. [18:00] Yeah. [18:00] And I definitely have that issue maybe yesterday where I was working on something and I'm like, here's the GitHub PR. [18:04] Here's the link to the peer. [18:05] Here's the PR ID. [18:06] Like just use the tool, use the MCP to get the PR. [18:10] And it just, I don't know what it's like some days you're like, it's right on it. [18:14] And then some days it's like, I don't know how to talk to GitHub. [18:17] I don't know how to look on the, and you're like, they're like, maybe paste it in for me. [18:20] Like, come on. [18:21] But [18:22] you can do this by sending this command. [18:24] I'm like, what am I doing here? [18:27] If this is a rapper telling me how to use my terminal, we've gotten off base somewhere. [18:32] Yeah. [18:33] When I was like a freelancer and I was doing like freelance development, I hit a point where I was like a little bit too busy. [18:39] And I remember I had one project where there was a lot of just like spreadsheets and it used to like, it was a lot of manual, just like clean up this spreadsheet before you do a [18:48] thing. [18:48] And I like went on, I don't know, upwork or something. [18:51] And I hired some person that was like maybe like temp minimum wage or something like that. [18:56] And I'd always be sending instructions like here, here's all the spreadsheets. [18:59] Can you like, just do this manual work for me? [19:01] Just like that. [19:01] And it's like. [19:02] to now where I'm working on a WooCommerce store and I'll be like product export all my products as a CSV, drop it in, tell the AI exactly the tweaks that I want and then import [19:12] it back in. [19:12] it's like, it's about as good as when I used to email it to somebody that was like, you know, a college student or whatever. [19:20] And it's kind of crazy that it is like this little assistant and you're like, [19:25] Okay, do I want to give them full WordPress admin access? [19:28] Do I want to give them, it's, you're just having the same conversation in your head of what are the boundaries and what are the like, like security controls that I'm going to [19:36] put on this person, you know? [19:37] Yeah, that's what I was gonna say is like that's a really good analogy for how to think about access and stuff like that, right? [19:43] It's like we've always known to think about like systems access and stuff like that with people and and I think the the challenge with like AI tools and with MCP in particular and [19:57] just like agentic behavior, I guess even more generally Which is not necessarily MCP. [20:03] But anyhow, is that like that becomes the trade-off right is like [20:07] you're limiting the benefit that you get from this tool by telling it what it can't do or by preventing it from accessing certain things. [20:17] I don't see that as a problem. [20:18] I think that's good that we're able to do that and there's still enough to gain on the other side of it. [20:27] Like you said, like... [20:28] I don't know like maybe you had to correct this college kids spreadsheets every once in a while and you didn't want to give him access to everything so you still have to do some [20:35] pieces manually and you still have to send the email back and forth but like It was still saving you time and it was still worth your money to have somebody doing that I think [20:43] we're gonna see the same sort of trade-offs here where maybe it's not as completely like you know hundred percent this is all I ever do I don't have to touch my store and AI just [20:54] handles my whole store for me, but I think we'll find the [20:57] where we can lean into that and the places where we lean out of that and still benefit a lot from it. [21:04] Yeah, and the AI doesn't disappear for a week to not answer your emails. [21:08] So there's that extra benefit too. [21:10] um One of the things you were talking about, like local models, I think one thing that's tough with e-commerce is the amount of like really, I wanna say. [21:20] private data, there's a lot of kind of, I don't know, you have all this customer information, you have all of their order history, you're not, not like you have like their [21:29] credit card number, but you definitely have like payment information. [21:32] Um, you know, there's a lot of privacy concerns about it. [21:35] Do you think that's going to affect how, how much access we can open up to a store, you know, connecting a store to some LLM, like does a local model help mitigate that in any [21:46] way or. [21:47] well, mean, so the idea with the local model, like specifically where local is, is maybe a question right now, like of like, we'll see where we end up with this. [21:58] But the idea basically there is just that the data doesn't go anywhere else. [22:02] That the, I'm spacing on the term right now. [22:06] thing that the LLM does to give it meaning. [22:09] Not embedding, what's the other word? [22:11] my God, anyhow. [22:12] Inference, yes, thank you. [22:13] Yeah, the inference all happens on your machine or on a server that you control, depending on, again, where exactly local ends up living. [22:23] But yeah, so in that sense, the data doesn't have to, you. [22:27] You control where the data goes, I guess is what I'll say. [22:29] Like it can, it might go to a different machine or something, but you, by opening it up to opening up the MCP or just the store in general to integrate with a local model, which [22:40] they can do currently, by the way. [22:41] Um, but like that, that does give you that extra layer of control over, okay, where is my data being processed? [22:47] and then, a local model that isn't connected back to a cloud provider isn't like sending your data. [22:55] anywhere like it's it's literally just doing the inference it's reading and assigning meaning and then spitting out whatever its response is whether that's a tool call or a [23:03] language response or a big long chain of thought thing or whatever you know like it's just doing that piece all on your machine so that's why that's why I think that [23:12] local model advancement is going to be such a huge piece of specifically like e-commerce, LLM usage. [23:19] I think it's especially in the Woo context where folks are kind of have an expectation of owning their data and owning everything already to begin with. [23:30] They might be self-hosting their e-commerce store just from the outset. [23:34] They definitely don't want to then hook that up to, you know, a chat GPT that's like maybe they're like [23:39] I don't know like just send sends data across the Atlantic and then you know like it's processed on somebody else's server and who knows what they're Tracking in their analytics [23:48] on that data, and you know there's so many unknowns there that [23:52] I don't know, we can get as many good promises as you want from a cloud provider. [23:56] At the end of the day, we're seeing with Google Analytics and pushback on that in the last year or two. [24:02] It's just a matter of you have to be doing things locally for it to be considered privacy conscious or secure or however you want to frame it. [24:13] There's a lot of benefits to that. [24:15] The other side is that you also get like, [24:18] you also reduce that lag time, right? [24:20] So there's actually like performance benefits here too, right? [24:23] So that's why I'm kind of bullish on local models is they have benefits outside of the regulation around. [24:30] How the tech is used they have there's benefits just on the purely on the technical side So the fact that both of those are pointing in the same way has me thinking that like, [24:40] okay, this is gonna be a real solution the main limitation right now is really just like that the that the local the smaller models that you can run locally are Not as powerful, [24:52] right? [24:52] That's it and and they're and they're not [24:56] I don't know, they're still getting better, I guess. [24:59] It's not like they're plateaued at a low level. [25:01] It's like they're just eight months behind or whatever, which in AI terms is five years or something. [25:09] But they're still progressing and there's still progress to be made there, both in terms of... [25:15] what the models themselves are capable of. [25:17] I guess there's maybe a few factors here. [25:19] What the models themselves are capable of, the sort of training and tuning we can offer around those to apply them more specifically to a task and hardware side of things, like [25:31] how the systems that we have are being built to support these. [25:36] I don't wanna be quoted publicly as saying that like a AI on your machine is the software. [25:45] to all privacy concerns. [25:48] think like Microsoft Recall is a really good example of where that's very much not the case, right? [25:54] And so I don't want to be too like blindly optimistic about that, but I think there's a version of that that does, you know, like keep you in control of where your data runs, [26:05] doesn't create a backup of everything that somebody, if somebody gets access to it, they have every, all that information anyways. [26:12] There's a version of that that runs in a privacy and security minded way that I think will unlock a lot of the potential here. [26:21] Yeah. [26:21] And I mean, in terms of like what a local model can do or it like a really terrible metaphor, like analogy is like when you think of when we used to have flip phones and then [26:32] if somebody would have said like one day you're going to be able to fully stream a 4k Lord of the Rings while you're standing in line at the grocery store to your phone, like you'd [26:40] been like, no, there's no way that much data is just going to like, you know, but it, but like now that's completely normal. [26:46] And I'm sure that like, these are solvable problems that like we're clear. [26:51] seeing the benefits but I think there is like a trade-off where [26:54] The benefit you have with like cloud stuff is number one with e-commerce, it's a lot of information sometimes. [27:00] So like I've done things like, hey, pull up my store and give me this information. [27:04] And one, if the MCP doesn't return, sometimes it's like, all right, I'm just going to pull every record you have and try to figure it out. [27:11] And you're like, no, no, no, no, no. [27:12] There are filter, like you can filter this query first before you do it. [27:16] Um, but even still, it's just a lot of information. [27:18] And so do you have [27:20] Are there issues with like just the sheer volume of, of context that sometimes ends up happening with MCP where you're like, it's just like, now this is just too much [27:29] information. [27:29] Like. [27:30] absolutely. [27:30] mean, I think like even [27:32] MCP itself like just the pieces of exposing the tools and how they're used and what the input and output schemas are like Even that can eat up a lot of context, right? [27:43] So I think there's still optimization happening on that front both and like from the protocol layer like just MCP broadly like how do we approach this better but then also [27:52] like in implementations of that like a lot of folks just kind of ported rest API's in this sort of initial wave because that's the thing that makes the most [28:01] that's like the closest to what you're trying to do with MCP. [28:04] But the pieces there that are actually needed and how we handle like the agent discovering what tools are available and stuff, that can eat up a lot of your context window being [28:14] kind of the limitation that we have now, right? [28:16] Like the bottleneck there. [28:17] um So just the tooling can eat up a lot of that, let alone then like you said, like... [28:23] the tool, like either the wrong tool being used or the tool being designed in a way that just like pulls a whole ton of info down and then you have to figure out like how to parse [28:33] through that, like that eats up, you know, that much more both context and like processing power and all that, right? [28:40] So, yeah. [28:42] that was something that I remember somebody asked James LaPage who does like runs the AI stuff at automatic and they asked him about that. [28:49] And he had said that he thinks that's something that the clients are gonna solve. [28:54] And I did see recently that I think Claude now has like a tool search or something like where it's kind of like, it's gonna stop exposing, it's not gonna expose every single tool [29:03] or it's gonna, once you have a certain amount of tools, it's gonna like. [29:06] take some of its own time to figure out the proper tools. [29:10] And so it's like, there are all these problems and they also all seem like they will be solvable eventually. [29:16] But if you had to pick, if a year from now we wanted WooCommerce MCP to be a thing that people are using and enjoying, what do you think are the top priorities? [29:27] And it could even be WordPress in general, because it does run on the WordPress stuff. [29:32] But like, [29:33] What do you think are the top priorities that should be worked on? [29:36] Ooh, yeah, give me a wish list. [29:38] This is good. [29:39] think, man, I think the implementation steps, like I said, are pretty high on the list of getting it, and some of this is... [29:48] like what we should be working on and just like what needs to happen in the ecosystem like more broadly, right? [29:53] Like I don't think anybody who necessarily needs to solve for this or even like at the WordPress level, like MCP clients being more like consumer friendly, right? [30:02] Will be a huge part of this story, right? [30:04] Like once... [30:05] once that becomes a more common thing that folks can interact with. [30:08] To your point, like it's maybe not a bad thing that we don't just have everybody trying to run these servers on their own right now, but I think that's gonna be a big part of it is [30:16] like the client experience being better. [30:18] Within the Woo and WordPress sphere, I think the setup for that is the big thing of like making it like completely dead simple to set these things up and get them running within [30:28] whatever client you have no matter what. [30:31] Yeah. [30:31] and not being tied to certain implementations or certain integration patterns or something like that, but really just being able to like, ideally, guess, like flip a switch on your [30:42] site and then like, you just, it's just available, right? [30:45] So I think that's going to be a big step is like getting it to where we're no longer, you know, copy pasting, JSON. [30:52] Yeah [30:53] that to hook these up which is like not a huge barrier when I want to dive into some weird technical rabbit hole but like is absolutely a barrier for broad adoption. [31:02] um [31:04] So I think that's part of it. [31:05] The other piece then is both, I guess, like twofold. [31:09] It's like getting the, tailoring the tooling to be more efficient or something, right? [31:14] Like I said, like with the local model use case, like I've been really limited by. [31:20] just the tooling itself by like, you know, the LLM can, or the SLM, small language model in that case, like can really only handle so much context. [31:29] And so it gets slammed by, you know, maybe a couple dozen tools all at once. [31:34] And then it's sort of spent in terms of what it can really do. [31:37] uh So getting that fine tuned, but I think with that comes like a... [31:42] exploration of like the use cases and better understanding of the actual use cases here and shaping that around you know what folks are going to be trying to do with this and [31:52] that one might be more down the line like I said I think there's some [31:55] more just like of like initial barriers to overcome, I guess, before we get to that. [32:02] But I think keeping that long term in mind is important as we're setting this stuff up. [32:07] It's still like the time we want to have that in mind and not just be making it technically possible. [32:13] I think we've kind of hit that marker of like, great, this is a thing that is possible. [32:17] So we made the thing, it works. [32:19] Now it's like make it right is kind of the next step of like make it do the things in the way that we expect. [32:24] expect and be able to do the kind of things that we expect. [32:27] So I feel like that's more the direction that comes next. [32:30] It's a little bit more on the fine tuning, but it's still kind of early days, I think. [32:35] Yeah, and I'm like, I'm not the most technical person, but from what I understand the way that WordPress ended up going, it's like, you have an MCP endpoint, but you don't really [32:44] have like an MCP server particularly. [32:47] So you load this kind of local proxy thing that runs and it's, you know, there's a couple extra steps and work, you know, if you were Shopify, you could just throw a bunch of [32:57] compute at everything. [32:58] like, you just have the resources you have, you host everything. [33:01] Yeah. [33:03] With WordPress where you have people on $5 a month hosting plans and all these sorts of things, I think it's just a bigger issue in general. [33:12] It's even beyond AI, even some of the other features like the block editor and collaboration, all these things that are just like, they just require more. [33:19] They just require a lot more. [33:21] And it'll be interesting to see like. [33:23] with WordPress, it's like there's never one way to do something. [33:26] It's like some hosting companies will have a way to do it. [33:29] we both work for hosting companies. [33:30] that both are trying to figure their offer for it. [33:33] And then there's the core itself. [33:35] And then there's gonna be some people that are gonna try to launch plugins or little cloud layers and things. [33:40] So it's gonna be, I feel like it's gonna be messy for a while before it's clean, probably. [33:45] um [33:47] would even... [33:47] Question if it's gonna get too clean like that Maybe it's bad news to a lot of people But I I think like there's value in being I was having a conversation with some folks about [33:59] this at a meetup this last week There's value in having these integration layers or these Integration abilities at different layers I guess like to being being able to kind of [34:09] compose the stack in the way that makes sense for your solutions Or for you for what you need out of it, you know people are the meat about that somebody was talking about [34:17] like N8n as this like open source sort of workflow automation tool. [34:22] It's kind of a new age Zapier, right? [34:25] Or something like that. [34:26] That's just like, okay, how can I get all these services to kind of piece together? [34:30] And they were saying that like, well, maybe that's the way it goes instead of MCP. [34:33] And I mean, I think that's kind of a false comparison anyways. [34:37] That was the main thing that I talked to him about was like, yeah, there's actually like, MCP is being used in that case, right? [34:42] Like it's not, they're not, it's not a [34:44] dichotomy or exclusive or anything like that, but also like the idea that they had of like, well, maybe I have this other tool that's external to even my chat bot that I'm [34:53] managing all of this workflow through is like, yes, there's tons of value in still having these other layers where you can manage things, whether that's, back to the WordPress [35:03] context, whether that's like, you know, a plugin that handles something or your host handling something or WordPress or Woo or, know, like, [35:11] I think there's value in having some options there as maybe discouraging as that is. [35:16] It's maybe a two parter that like, there's a, there's enough going on in AI that we don't want there to be more options. [35:24] We're all like dying for there to be one clear answer here. [35:26] So like, can stop learning all the other things for a little bit. [35:32] but also like, also there's a, I just think a lot of the discussion around it is very like totalizing or something. [35:39] There's not, that's not the right word maybe, but, it's very much like this is either going to completely. [35:44] take over everything and be the only tool that ever matters or I don't need to think about it. [35:49] And I just don't think that that's the case with, that's just not how tech works at all. [35:54] So I don't think that's gonna be the case here either. [35:56] I think there's gonna be different degrees of things that find kind of their niche for this, that, or the other. [36:02] There will be some underlying pieces, like the idea of an LLM. [36:06] is going away or is going to diminish in its importance, maybe. [36:10] But I would put MCP in a similar category where I'm like... [36:13] The ability to have an open standard to allow an LLM to interact with an app is not gonna go away. [36:21] And everybody in the field is getting behind MCP. [36:25] Even OpenAI has whatever 800 million, 900 million users, they could have built their own thing and built their own sandbox and left everybody else out of it. [36:36] But them getting behind MCP and the agentic AI foundation, the open standard way of [36:43] doing things, it's like, okay, this is clearly where everything's gonna go, where everybody's investing right now. [36:49] So that's another piece where would say I don't think this goes away. [36:52] But does it become the one tool that we use to do everything? [36:56] Probably not. [36:57] I think there's lots of ways that we can build stuff. [36:59] Yeah, and there'll be like lessons learned from it that might apply to other things. [37:03] Like sometimes you just have to go through stuff and some protocols disappear. [37:08] know, WordPress has a bunch of these like protocols like Adam and pings and all, know, all these things that are like in there that don't stick around. [37:16] And then there's RSS that's like stuck around forever. [37:18] And it's just the value of a, of a good, well-adopted protocol. [37:22] And like, I feel like the, the other piece that's really has to get solved here is it. [37:28] For an MCP like WooCommerce MCP to make a lot of sense, like yes, one, can save you a lot of time. [37:33] And I think that that's somewhat valuable, but I also think there's a lot of people, in open source where like they sometimes don't value their time as like they're willing to [37:42] put in the time if it saves them money, you know what I Like they're, willing to do things themselves and stuff, but there has to be some other benefit. [37:49] so like there will have to be like, you know, this actually improves, you know, whether it's like [37:55] it leaks off into like the marketing or like other places where optimist optimizer. [38:00] So like it has to be more than just, it's a slightly faster way to do a thing. [38:04] And so it'll be interesting to see once it starts touching, like, you know, especially, mean, you know, WooCommerce, it's never just WooCommerce. [38:11] It's WooCommerce and five other things that all have to work together, the inventory and the shipping and the, like the marketing automations and the whatever. [38:18] it's like, so it'll be interesting to see if like, [38:21] if there's a way where it starts optimizing all of those things and does it because with MCP it's like, they all just adopted this. [38:28] We don't have to worry about, go build me this integration and so on and that sort of thing. [38:32] Nope. [38:34] Yeah, I mean, think that's that's where, like woo and WordPress and like MCP kind of become a really good match for each other in that they're both like these platforms that [38:46] are enabling a lot of all these different pieces of integration to come together, to get a single thing done, right. [38:52] Or to, to kind of build into a single platform. [38:55] yeah, I think like the idea of like being able to use a single [39:00] MCP client to work on your WooCommerce site that can also in the same chat context interact with MailChimp you know activity that you need to do for your marketing or [39:09] whatever right like I think those use cases are so aligned that this tech makes a lot of sense to the the Woo Merchant or developer who [39:19] is currently having to interact with all those services separately themselves. [39:23] now can, or future state will be able to kind of have a layer over the top of that where they can interact. [39:31] with them and kind of more in one place, which is for a lot of folks that is the woo admin right now, right? [39:35] Like it is like the place where all those pieces come together in a lot of ways. [39:39] So I think, yeah, having a different way to interact with those is going to be a really good fit for the kinds of things that merchants are having to deal with. [39:48] Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing where all of this goes. [39:51] I think maybe, well, I could keep going forever, but maybe we should wrap up and you can give me like, give everyone like the call to action of like, are you posting about any of [40:02] this stuff or talking about this in certain places or where are you kind of going to like share? [40:08] Cause I feel like you're one of the people I see the most kind of like exploring the fringes. [40:13] Yeah, yeah, I've really tried to throw myself out there this last year. [40:17] Yeah, so I, let's see, I got maybe like three places. [40:20] So I'm on Twitter probably the most as far as just like posting, throwing things out there, what I'm working on, thoughts about things that are going on or whatever, right? [40:29] So that's probably the easiest. [40:31] I'm on, in the WooCommerce community Slack. [40:34] Give that one a shout out. [40:36] I think that's just like a really key place to be in terms of both the community around and also interfacing with folks like yourself at Automatic who are either building these [40:46] things or know the people who are. [40:47] I can't say how many times I ping you in that Slack just to talk to somebody else. [40:53] Brian's here. [40:54] oh [40:55] Yeah, yeah, Brian's here and knows who I need to talk to, so we'll start there. [41:00] for other folks who like, you know, maybe don't know all the ins and outs of things, it's good place to start and to figure things out. [41:07] And I'm there jabbing about whatever I'm working on as well. [41:12] Yeah, I think those are the main ones. [41:14] And then, know, Skyverge, company, skyverge.com, got [41:18] a shout out for us there as far as like the actual you know things I'm getting paid to build or whatever right. [41:24] yeah, definitely. [41:26] Yeah, and in the Woo Marketplace, think, right? [41:28] You guys are sky-verging there too. [41:32] Awesome. [41:32] All right, well thanks, Nick. [41:34] I really appreciate this. [41:35] I hope people maybe came away with the amount of understanding that anybody can have at this stage of it, you know? [41:42] And I think just like, just the optimism and like enthusiasm for like, let's just get excited about something new, you know? [41:50] Mm-hmm. [41:50] Yeah, yeah, I think excitement and also like, you know, kind of navigating the way forward, figuring out like what are these pieces that are kind of coming together? [41:57] I think there's a lot to be excited about and a lot of work to be done. [42:01] So, you know, that's the invitation, I guess, is to engage in both of those. [42:08] Yeah, thanks Brian.  ## 📺 Video ![](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4lQgflIgjU) --- # 📝 Full Notes (Deep-Read Analysis) # 🏷️ Title: What's Possible with WooCommerce MCP w/ Nik McLaughlin ## 🧰 Action Inbox - [H1] Explore MCP setup for local WooCommerce sites — technical implementation #development - [H2] Evaluate privacy implications of AI store management — data security concerns #security - [H3] Test local vs cloud AI models for e-commerce — performance comparison #testing ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - [SkyVerge](https://skyverge.com) - [WooCommerce Community Slack](https://woocommerce.com/community-slack/) ## 📝 Summary - Nik McLaughlin from SkyVerge/GoDaddy explores WooCommerce MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration - MCP enables AI agents to interact directly with WooCommerce stores through natural language - Current limitations include complex setup, context window constraints, and reliability issues - Local AI models offer privacy benefits but with reduced capability compared to cloud solutions - Technology shows promise for streamlining e-commerce management but needs simplified implementation ## 📖 Main Content MCP (Model Context Protocol) represents an open standard allowing large language models to interact with applications beyond simple text responses. For WooCommerce, this means merchants can manage their stores through natural language conversations rather than traditional admin interfaces. The technology enables store management tasks like checking inventory, processing orders, and updating products through chat interfaces. However, implementation currently requires technical expertise and multiple configuration steps that limit broader adoption. Privacy concerns around customer data processing favor local AI models, though these currently offer reduced capabilities compared to cloud-based solutions. The WordPress ecosystem's diversity of hosting environments and technical skill levels presents unique challenges for standardized MCP deployment. ## 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:00](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=0) — [H1] Introduction and Background - Key idea: Nik McLaughlin leads product and brand management at SkyVerge/GoDaddy - Evidence: "SkyVerge specifically focuses on WooCommerce extensions with suite of 40 extensions" #### ⏱️ [02:30](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=150) — [H2] AI as Opportunity vs Threat - Key idea: Focus on opportunities rather than doomsday scenarios for AI in WordPress - Evidence: "We have a say in what gets developed and how these tools develop because it's still in progress" #### ⏱️ [04:15](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=255) — [H3] Mobile Revolution Comparison - Key idea: AI transformation parallels mobile internet's impact on web development - Evidence: "Mobile change is maybe the best comparison for understanding what kind of scale of change" #### ⏱️ [06:45](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=405) — [H1] MCP Fundamentals - Key idea: MCP is the open standard for how LLMs can perform actions beyond text responses - Evidence: "MCP enables all of the apps to interop between each other in one interface" #### ⏱️ [09:20](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=560) — [H2] WooCommerce MCP Implementation - Key idea: Basic store management tasks work through natural language interface - Evidence: "Anything you can do through the admin, you can kind of do through a chat bot instead" #### ⏱️ [12:10](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=730) — [H2] Local AI Models Exploration - Key idea: Testing local models addresses privacy concerns but with current limitations - Evidence: "Running LLM models locally on a MacBook Air, not relying on cloud provider at all" #### ⏱️ [14:30](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=870) — [H3] Setup Complexity Challenges - Key idea: Current setup process requires extensive technical configuration - Evidence: "Ended up being like a thousand words or more of getting all of the pieces in place" #### ⏱️ [16:45](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1005) — [H2] Safety and Access Control - Key idea: Non-deterministic AI agents require careful permission boundaries - Evidence: "Built into anything you can do in the WP admin you can do via chat bot" #### ⏱️ [19:20](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1160) — [H3] Privacy and Data Control - Key idea: Local models provide data control benefits for e-commerce applications - Evidence: "WooCommerce folks have expectation of owning their data and owning everything already" #### ⏱️ [22:15](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1335) — [H2] Context Window Limitations - Key idea: Large data volumes and tool schemas consume available context space - Evidence: "Even MCP itself, exposing the tools and schemas, can eat up a lot of context" #### ⏱️ [25:30](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1530) — [H1] Priority Improvements Needed - Key idea: Simplified setup and better client experience are top priorities - Evidence: "Making it completely dead simple to set these things up and get them running" #### ⏱️ [28:10](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1690) — [H2] WordPress Ecosystem Complexity - Key idea: WordPress's diverse hosting and technical landscape complicates standardization - Evidence: "There's never one way to do something in WordPress - hosting companies, core, plugins" #### ⏱️ [31:45](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1905) — [H1] Future Integration Potential - Key idea: MCP's value emerges when connecting multiple services in unified interface - Evidence: "Single MCP client to work on WooCommerce that can also interact with MailChimp" ## 📚 References - [SkyVerge WooCommerce Extensions](https://skyverge.com) - [WooCommerce Community Slack](https://woocommerce.com/community-slack/) - [MCP Protocol Documentation](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - MCP creates a standardized way for AI to interact with WooCommerce stores through natural conversation rather than traditional admin interfaces - Local AI models offer privacy advantages for sensitive e-commerce data but currently lack the power of cloud-based alternatives - The main barriers to adoption are complex technical setup requirements and the need for simplified implementation tools ## 📰 Newsletter **AI Meets E-commerce: WooCommerce MCP Opens New Possibilities** The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is bringing AI-powered store management to WooCommerce, allowing merchants to handle inventory, orders, and product updates through simple conversations. While the technology shows tremendous promise for streamlining e-commerce workflows, current implementations require significant technical expertise. Key benefits include natural language interaction with store data and the potential for local AI processing to address privacy concerns. However, challenges around setup complexity and context limitations need resolution before broader adoption. For WordPress developers interested in AI integration, this represents an emerging opportunity to build user-friendly tools that bridge the gap between powerful AI capabilities and everyday merchant needs. Resources: [Learn WordPress](https://learn.wordpress.org/), [Developer Docs](https://developer.wordpress.org/), [WP-CLI](https://wp-cli.org/) ## ✅ Action Items #### WordPress - Core AI: MCP integration exploration, guardrails for e-commerce data - Community: MCP education materials, best practices documentation - Documentation: MCP setup guides, security considerations - Plugins: Simplified MCP server implementations, hosting integration - Hosting: MCP support standardization, privacy-first solutions ## 🧪 Hypotheses - Local AI models will become viable alternatives to cloud solutions for e-commerce within 18 months - MCP adoption in WordPress will require hosting provider integration rather than individual merchant setup - Privacy concerns will drive demand for local AI processing in e-commerce applications - Simplified setup tools will be the primary factor determining MCP adoption rates ### 📊 Methodology - Compare local vs cloud AI model performance on common WooCommerce tasks - Survey merchant privacy preferences and technical comfort levels - Test MCP setup complexity across different hosting environments - Analyze context window usage patterns in e-commerce AI interactions ### ❓ Questions - How will WordPress hosting providers standardize MCP support across diverse technical environments? - What privacy regulations will emerge for AI processing of e-commerce customer data? - Which WooCommerce use cases provide the most compelling ROI for AI automation? ### 🔮 Future Research - Impact of local AI hardware advancement on e-commerce adoption rates - Integration patterns between MCP and existing WordPress workflow tools - Cross-platform MCP standardization efforts beyond WordPress ecosystem ### 💡 Implications - Practice: E-commerce developers need AI integration skills and privacy-first architectures - Policy: Data processing regulations may require local AI capabilities for compliance - Security: AI agent permissions require same access control principles as human users - Education: Merchant training needed for AI-assisted store management workflows - Funding: Investment opportunities in simplified MCP implementation tools ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment Reading level estimate: 12th grade #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: Technical concepts explained through analogies - Improve: MCP architecture diagrams, data flow visualizations #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: Conversational interview format with natural explanations - Improve: Audio-only version, technical term pronunciation guide #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: Clear definitions, mobile revolution analogy, real-world examples - Improve: Glossary of AI/MCP terminology, comparative explanations #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: References to hands-on setup experiences - Improve: Step-by-step MCP setup tutorial, interactive demos #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: Problem-solution structure, technical limitations clearly stated - Improve: Decision trees for local vs cloud AI, implementation timelines #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners - Present: Community Slack references, collaborative development discussion - Improve: Discussion prompts for WordPress meetups, peer setup sessions #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners - Present: Individual exploration examples, self-directed learning paths - Improve: Self-assessment checklist, independent project ideas #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners - Present: Ecosystem thinking about WordPress diversity - Improve: Technology evolution analogies, adaptation patterns ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment #### Screen reader semantics - Present: Clear heading structure, logical content flow - Improve: Explicit link descriptions, technical term definitions #### Keyboard navigation - Present: Standard video player controls - Improve: Transcript with timestamp navigation links #### Contrast and readability - Present: Text-based content with good contrast - Improve: Ensure video captions meet contrast standards #### Text resizing and reflow - Present: Responsive text layout - Improve: Video player responsiveness at high zoom levels #### Media and captions - Present: Full transcript provided - Improve: Time-synced captions, downloadable transcript #### Forms and interactions - Present: Simple video interface - Improve: Accessible video speed controls ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment #### Cultural breadth - Present: US-focused WordPress/WooCommerce context - Improve: Global e-commerce examples, international privacy perspectives #### Inclusive language - Present: Gender-neutral technical discussion - Improve: Plain-language alternatives for technical jargon #### Neurodiversity support - Present: Consistent interview structure, clear topic transitions - Improve: Visual breaks, summary sections for complex concepts #### Representation - Present: Two male voices in tech leadership roles - Improve: Diverse guest perspectives on AI impact #### Psychological safety - Present: Balanced view of AI opportunities and challenges - Improve: Acknowledgment of job displacement concerns ### ✅ Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - Deductive strength: Mobile revolution analogy effectively illustrates scale of AI transformation - Inductive strength: Privacy concerns logically lead to local AI model preference - Causal reasoning: Setup complexity directly impacts adoption rates - Analogical strength: AI assistant compared to human contractor for access control #### Fallacies - Appeal to novelty: Some enthusiasm for AI may overstate current capabilities - False dichotomy: Local vs cloud presented as binary choice rather than hybrid approaches #### Tone of voice - Overall tone: Cautiously optimistic, technically informed, practically focused ### 🛡️ DARVO Analysis - Deny: No denial patterns present - Attack: No attacks on critics or skeptics - Reverse victim/offender: Not applicable to technical discussion - Emotional cues: Balanced excitement about opportunities with acknowledgment of limitations ## 🎯 Conclusion MCP integration with WooCommerce represents a significant opportunity to transform e-commerce management through natural language interaction. While current technical barriers limit immediate adoption, the combination of privacy-conscious local AI models and simplified setup tools could unlock widespread merchant usage. The WordPress ecosystem's diversity requires thoughtful implementation strategies that accommodate varying technical capabilities and hosting environments. ## 🧱 Refactor Appendix ### 📚 Literature Split Pad Purpose: Stage CEE units that become Literature notes. Split level: H3 ### [H1] MCP enables natural language WooCommerce management > [!quote] What's Possible with WooCommerce MCP by Nik McLaughlin via Webmasters FM. Published 2025-01-26. > "Anything you can do through the admin, you can kind of do through a chat bot instead." Demonstrates core MCP value proposition for e-commerce workflows. [view highlight](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=560#H1) #xref #articleseed ID:rw_mcp_admin ### [H2] Local AI models provide privacy benefits > [!quote] What's Possible with WooCommerce MCP > "WooCommerce folks have expectation of owning their data and owning everything already." Privacy-first approach aligns with WordPress community values. [view highlight](https://youtu.be/b4lQgflIgjU?t=1160#H2) #xref ID:rw_privacy_local --- ### 🔖 Atomic Split Pad (Zettel Candidates) Purpose: Promote reusable claims into Atomic notes. Split level: H4 #### [Z1] Setup complexity limits MCP adoption - Technical barriers prevent mainstream merchant usage - Pointer to 14:30 timestamp discussion - Links: [[AI-Adoption-Barriers]] [[WordPress-Complexity]] #### [Z2] Context windows constrain AI agent capabilities - Tool schemas and data volumes consume available processing space - Pointer to 22:15 context limitation discussion - Links: [[AI-Limitations]] [[MCP-Technical-Constraints]] --- ### ✏️ Fleeting Queue Purpose: Capture quick actions for Fleeting notes. - [F1] Research N8n workflow automation for MCP comparison — context/meetup discussion #fleeting #inbox - [F2] Test local AI model performance on WooCommerce tasks — comparison study #fleeting #inbox - [F3] Document MCP setup process simpl --- # 📄 Full Transcript *Auto-generated from YouTube captions · timestamps roughly every 30 seconds · [watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4lQgflIgjU)* **[00:00]** Welcome to Web Masters FM. Today I have Nick from Sky Verge. Nick, how are you doing today? >> Hey, doing good. Thanks, Brian. >> Maybe for people who don't know you or Sky Verge, could you give like kind of a brief bio what you do, what you guys do over there? >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I'm on the Sky Verge team at GoDaddy, but Sky Verge specifically is a uh is focused on like Woo Commerce extensions. Um, so we have a suite of I think still 40 is our count right now of uh Woo Commerce extensions. **[00:30]** Biggest of those being like WooCommerce memberships and then you know the list goes on from there. But uh yeah, so I've been with Skybridge for about 5 years. I got acquired by GoDaddy within that time. Uh and I've been kind of coming up through the ranks there but most recently doing mostly like product and brand management. >> Okay. So get to go on shows and do talks and also like figure out what we're building and things like that. >> Nice. Was your background development though? Like did you >> It's kind of mixed. Yeah. So I I started **[01:02]** at Sky Verge on the support team um and came up through that route and that's always been kind of my primary focus. I think even like my engineering or product approach is very customercentric. But I did like get half of a computer science degree and you know have spent some time kind of embedded with our engineering team and stuff like that. So I kind of float around a lot trying not to dilute my skills too much here but also you know get the most out of perspective and customer insight and stuff like that constantly. **[01:32]** >> Nice. I had a recent episode like late last year with uh Ian Meisner who I think was at Sky Verge, right? >> My old boss. Yeah. >> Yeah. He I was looking this morning and his was like the most listened to episode I've had in a long time or like just you know I haven't I've only been doing this like a year but it was >> dramatically more and the topic of that one was like check out optimizations for Black Friday. So I was like okay that's like a a pretty clear like I can understand why that one got a lot of traffic more than but I feel like this topic today will probably beat that one **[02:03]** because this is really like the topic. Yeah, we it'll be a competition and it's really I we want to deep dive into like MCP I think specifically and WooCommerce MCP because you've been doing a lot of cool stuff and it's been fun like seeing a lot of that conversation in our community Slack. But I guess I wanted to start like a big picture. What is your if you like take a step back and you just look at like 2026 AI hitting us as product people in the the WordPress space? Do you have like what's your like **[02:35]** initial gut reaction to what's happening? >> Gut reaction. I I don't know if this is gut or if this is like a trained thing by this point. Like we're far enough in it that maybe I've like calmed the nerves a little more, but I I'm definitely like looking more for opportunities than I am for doomsday scenarios. I think yeah, I don't know. Like I said, I think some of that might just be like training of like, okay, I've got my head around enough of this to like start to see those things. But it's really like kind of shifting that focus of like a lot of the big pieces I **[03:06]** think are landing as far as like what this tech will do and how it's going to be implemented and things like that and now it's more the time to actually build useful things with it. U there's still a lot of limitations I think on like what can be done there and how well these things actually work. So I mean that's a lot of what I want to talk about too is like realistically what's it what are the challenges still in front of us. But I but I think the biggest encouragement I have from last year, I think going into this year is that because so much of this is still being developed or **[03:37]** solidified that like it's an opportunity to decide how this goes. Like we have a say in what gets developed and how these tools develop because it's still in progress. Like based on what we build now, we kind of create demand for whatever comes next. >> Yeah. And I I mean I definitely hit that roller coaster like or like pendulum of like existential dread to like we're in the like a massive opportunity. I think of like maybe cell phones and like mobile internet as like the last big **[04:08]** thing that hit web development where it was like this is like a whole new avenue of things that we get to imagine that we weren't possible before and changed and it had plenty of other effects on society and culture of course you know. >> Yeah. Yeah. But it definitely was like if you're open to opportunity and you're excited about it, it's kind of fun to get to see it happening in real time and not like I don't know how old you are but like I remember earlyish internet but like not at the same level but I feel like we get to see this at like the really early stages and we're getting it **[04:39]** from the ground up. >> Yeah. I think like the mobile like cell phone change is like maybe the best comparison that I've come across as far as understanding like what kind of scale of change and some of the mechanics of how things are changing too like it's not so much I mean let's see like on the if the term AI is too big right like we all know this >> so it's like I want to say like on the AI side but it's like but that's everything that anybody's talking about so what does that mean **[05:10]** Like there's a lot of stuff going on on the like what computers can do like oh wow all these new like things that we never knew computers could do or something which is you know sort of like the hardware of the mobile revolution right of like wow it can you know like whatever it's got a GPS in it and now everybody just has a GPS in their pocket or whatever right like all these different pieces that we thought were that were really advanced tech at the time you know and now we've kind of become accustomed to but I I guess yeah I I think there's a lot more on the like **[05:40]** what are we going to do with it front right now. >> Yeah. >> That that we have to kind of figure out like okay if this is a builtin that we like assume that these pieces of like that these features or something are possible um then how does that change how we build everything else? Like not everything needs a chatbot on it. But but I I think like the the shift there is maybe like instead of adding a chatbot to all of our apps, it's like how do we build our apps for the chatbot? Like >> we're not we're not trying to **[06:12]** >> pull all these features into the things that exist. It's like no, the things that we're building are now going to appear in different ways. And again, that's where I think like the mobile change is so good for web development. And it's like, yeah, we suddenly have to do responsive styling and then that goes beyond just like some CSS to move some divs around, but actually like rethinking that user interface and rethinking what interaction looks like. >> Yeah, >> I'm such a huge like hover effect person. I love anytime hover effects and I just have never found a I know there's **[06:43]** ways, but like I've never really gotten a good mobile hover experience that I like. >> Yeah. Yeah, stuff like that that it's like, oh, okay, this is like a little like interaction thing that we're used to that's now going to look kind of different because of those sort of bigger technological changes. >> Yeah. And I was talking to somebody on a different podcast and they were it was it was about like Woo Commerce and and you know the WordPress Woo Commerce the the admin UI is a little you know dated like it's been there a while. It's it's tried and true I guess is like a **[07:14]** positive way to say it. But one of the things that changed my mindset was the MCP approach where I was like, I'm not even like I'm doing things with my WooCommerce store without even literally >> looking at any of the user like I'm >> I have no no [clears throat] user interface. The user interface is literally just me talking to something and things are happening and it's like such a foundational shift that it's hard to wrap our head around. But maybe you can kind of break down like if somebody is like, "Oh, I keep hearing MCP. I keep hearing these kinds of concepts. What's **[07:46]** your maybe like quick explanation of like what it literally is or you know what it doesn't have to be super technical but like what exactly are we talking about when we say >> yeah I think like the the short version of like what is MCP is probably like MCP is the open standard for how LLMs can do things. So, LLM is maybe, you know, in the jargony side of things, but like it's how AI does things. >> Mhm. Yeah. >> I bristle a lot at the terminology, but **[08:18]** but yeah, it's like you have your chatbot that people are familiar with. I was just talking to my hair stylist the other day about chat GP, his experience with chat GPT and how funny he interacts with that. Anyways, so like people broadly know about it is the point, right? So then to go from there to like what is MCP? The MCP is like how you can actually do things in that experience beyond just getting a you know text in text out response and because it's an open standard it's also beyond any specific API integration that had to be **[08:48]** built. >> So [clears throat] to get like the next level of that I I think like the the next level up explanation is that like MCP enables all of the apps to interop between each other in one interface. Right? So that's that's where you get into the real magic of it is like it's embedded in your client, like your chat client that you're talking with that maybe has all this extra context about either what you or what project you're working on or whatever it is that you're trying to do. Um, and it takes that and **[09:22]** adds in these tools that let it do things from other services. So you can now connect that to not just a project that you're working on, but this project like this thing's hosted on GitHub and they have an MCP server and I got the, you know, we're both at companies that are using management software and stuff. So I had to like update the ticket in Jira and they have an MCP and all this stuff. And you can do all of that from a single interface. Really similar to like you were saying with Woo, like in the in the WordPress admin, you don't really **[09:53]** have to click around on all of the different places. is you can just kind of type out what you want and see that happen. And the MCP server, the MCP protocol really is like the thing that allows that whole actual interactivity to happen between the application like whether that's Woo Commerce or, you know, any other huge list of them and the LLM that's, you know, deciding what tools to use and things like that. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think what's cool about it, like you were saying, like it's a protocol that kind of now that it's getting supported by all these different things, it kind of like **[10:24]** abstracts it all into one spot. Like do we think like one day we're going to have a chatbot that's like WordPress has its own chat in the side that you chat with? Maybe. Maybe you'll just open chat GPT and it'll connect to your WordPress. But in either case, like if we can have an abstracted tool, then hopefully like we don't need to build each of those use cases and sit around and wait for them. Hopefully this interactivity layer, you know, done through MCP can hopefully unlock I'm hoping like all those things to just show up faster and it's like Claude now supports it and Chad now **[10:55]** supports it and if we see other you know chat come out I use Gemini a lot it's just going to make that kind of like transition a lot easier but in like practical terms what are some of the things you've tried with MCP on Woo Commerce and how how good has it gotten for you or like [laughter] how reliable has it been for you? Like what are some specifics? >> Yeah, I mean it's definitely like I think mixed results at this point like but that's also maybe because I'm pushing the edges a lot more so than **[11:26]** like trying to establish a solid base or something where somebody who's like maybe more on the agency side or something where they're like, you know, really trying to figure out how they're going to roll this out either for their own use or for their clients might be trying to really establish a core base. I'm like I I'm getting to play off in the the weeds a little more. So I I don't know if my experience is necessarily like representative of all of all of what's possible with the tech. But yeah, I've definitely hit some mixed results like so some of the specifics. I mean the the basics are like a lot of **[11:56]** like store management stuff like we said like being able to anything you can do through the admin you can kind of do through a chatbot instead. Mhm. >> So I've hooked up local WooCommerce sites to cursor to VS Code. The docs have a whole bunch of stuff about setting up through cloud. So that's kind of a well-worn path as well. Yeah. So like wherever your kind of chat client lives and then within that context being able to ask about the latest orders on your site or make **[12:27]** product changes and stuff like that, right? or check inventory levels and doing all of that in like a natural language way where you just just like you would ask somebody normally, you know, like you don't have to find the right words for it. You don't have to find the right menu for it. You can just have the thought based. >> Yeah. >> You know, verbalize the thought and then you're kind of good. And you can kind of get the the LLM does the magic of turning that into tool calls to get all the information. Right. So, yeah, it's been a lot of a lot of those basic pieces. I've I've played around mostly **[13:00]** with like the maybe like the implementation or like the technical side of that of like okay can I do this like one special interest of mine is with like running LLM models or language models locally. >> Okay. So like not relying on a cloud provider at all, but just having my own machine that runs. And I'm doing this like on a laptop, you know. I'm not like I don't have a special server hiding in the back or something that has, you know, teraflops of GPUs or whatever sitting in it. You know, I'm just like I've got my MacBook Air. like this is **[13:31]** because I want I'm interested in like the real world use cases of like >> if a merchant wants to interact with this tool on their site there's going to be some real limitations around being able to send that data off to a cloud provider or whatever. So I played around a lot with that and that's where I've definitely seen a lot of maybe the more of the limitations both on the technological side as far as like what a small model that can run on my laptop is capable of right now. >> There's a lot of room for improvement there. um and and improvements are **[14:01]** happening there. And then also on the like kind of integration layer, I guess where depending on exactly how you set that up, it can be very difficult to get running in the first place. >> Yeah. I I had a blog post about this uh maybe a month ago or two ago now um just about just walking through how I set it up and I thought oh yeah this will just be a quick like couple line explainer and it ended up being like [laughter] I don't know thousand words or more of like getting all of the pieces in place cuz I realized like how many assumptions **[14:33]** I was making about other things that I had already had running on my machine or something that's like oh right well yeah you have to have that too and then you have to download this model and then you have to know where to find a model in the first place. Like there's a lot of pieces to tie together. So I I think the in addition to just like the models getting more powerful, I think the the biggest like next piece for making a lot of this like more user friendly is and just usable in general is, you know, making it easier to get started like making the setup a breeze. And there's a **[15:06]** lot of ways to to simplify that, but I but yeah, I think that's going to be a big next step for 2026, right? >> I think it's nice that it's hard right now cuz it's also a little dangerous. Like it's a little dangerous to connect >> AI to say like a live WooCommerce store or something that important. But it's weird because normally this stuff comes to like developers first and we get to like explore it for a long time before like the you know the normal people are aware of a technology but this >> AI is very different like you said like **[15:37]** your hair stylists like my wife everybody I know like they're using like the consumer apps like chat GPT and like like they're they're like not that far behind and some of them in some ways are like almost like better at it in weird ways cuz they're just they're not as technical. So it's like they're almost like it makes more sense to them. So it's kind of weird because it does feel like like oh it's so hard and stuff but it's like well maybe we need like that heavy barrier to entry until it's like this safe reliable thing because I have to assume there's probably some amount of danger letting you know a **[16:07]** non-deterministic like agent just like mess around with your stuff like some issues there. I mean I yeah right like it's built into the anything you can do in the WP admin you can do via chatbot right like so it's like and and then maybe I guess like the added layer of understanding of like MCP is the layer for the language model to interact with your app not for you to interact with your app right like so you're talking to the LLM the LLM then decides what tools **[16:37]** to use right so you can guide it and that's actually part of the setup trouble right now is sometimes you have to tell it like how to use an MCP server or what tool to use or what schema or something and like obviously that's not how we want these things to work but by building that abstraction layer all the way to the point of just natural language like you do open up a lot of kind of in between of you know where problems can arise in either interpretation of what you wanted or like just flat out just execution that's **[17:08]** just like you said non-deterministic like you just don't know for sure what's going to happen. I think MCP builds a lot more determinism back into the system by like you get to the server developer gets to codify what happens when the tool gets called and set a schema and permissions and like elicitations. So like how to get more information before you do something or in order to carry out a task. So there you know like there's a little more like process there. It's like the the API **[17:38]** analogy kind of carries over in that sense that you're sort of defining an interaction a little bit more than just like we'll see what the you know like just pointing the LLM at a browser and seeing what buttons it clicks. It's like a whole other level. Who knows what's going to happen. So MCP at least like standardizes some of that from the developer side. But yeah, there's there's definitely like we're still throwing an LLM in the middle of it. >> Yeah. And I definitely had that issue maybe yesterday where I was working on something and I'm like here's the GitHub PR, here's the link to the PR, here's the PR ID, like just use the tool, use **[18:08]** the MCP to get the PR and it just I don't know. It's like some days you're like it's right on it. And then some days it's like I don't know how to talk to GitHub, I don't know how to look on the you're like they're like maybe paste it in for me like on >> like you can do this by sending this command. I'm like what what am I doing here? >> Yeah. If this is a rapper telling me how to use my terminal, like I we've we've gotten off base somewhere. >> Yeah. >> I mean, when I was like a freelancer and I was doing like freelance web development, I hit a point where I was like a little bit too busy. And I **[18:40]** remember I had one project where there was a lot of just like spreadsheets and it used to like it was a lot of manual just like clean up the spreadsheet before you do a thing. And I like went on I don't know Upwork or something and I hired some person that was like maybe like temp minimum wage or something like that. And I'd always be sending instructions like here here's all the spreadsheets. Can you like just do this manual work for me or something like that? And it's like to now where I'm working on a WooCommerce store and I'll be like product export all my products as a CSV, drop it in, tell the AI exactly the tweaks that I want and then **[19:11]** import it back in. And it's like it's about as good as when I used to email it to somebody that was like, you know, a college student or whatever. And it's kind of crazy that it is like this little assistant and you're like, "Okay, do I want to give them full WordPress admin access? Do I want to give them It's you're just having the same conversation in your head of what are the boundaries and what are the like like security controls that I'm going to put on this person, you know?" >> Yeah, that's ex that's what I was going to say is like that's a really good analogy for how to think about access **[19:42]** and stuff like that, right? is like we've always known to think about like systems access and stuff like that with people. Um, and and I think the the challenge with like AI tools and with MCP in particular and just like agentic behavior, I guess even more generally, um, >> which is not necessarily MCP, but anyhow, um, is that like that becomes the trade-off, right? Is like you're limiting the benefit that you get from this tool by telling it what it can't do **[20:14]** or by preventing it from accessing certain things. I I don't see that as a problem. I don't like I think that's a that's good that we're able to do that and >> there's still enough to gain on the other side of it like you said like I don't know like maybe you had to correct this college kid's spreadsheets every once in a while and you didn't want to give him access to everything so you still had to do some pieces manually and you still had to send the email back and forth but like it was still saving you time and it was still worth your money to have somebody doing that. I I think we're gonna see the same sort of **[20:44]** trade-offs here where maybe it's not as completely like, you know, 100% this is all I ever do. I don't have to touch my store and >> AI just handles my whole store for me. But I think we'll find the ways where we can lean into that and the ways the places where we lean out of that and still benefit a lot from it. >> Yeah. And and the AI doesn't, you know, disappear for a week to not answer your emails. So, right, there's that extra benefit, too. >> Yeah. One of the things you were talking about like local models. I think one **[21:14]** thing that's tough with e-commerce is the amount of like really I want to say private data. There's a lot of kind of I don't know you have all this customer information. You have all of their order history. You're not not like you have like their credit card number but you definitely have like payment information, right? >> Um you know there's a lot of privacy concerns about it. Do you think that's going to affect how how much access we can open up to a store, you know, connecting a store to some LLM? Like does a local model help **[21:45]** mitigate that in any way or >> Yeah. Well, I mean, so the idea with the local model, which like specifically where local is is maybe a question right now, like of like we'll see where we end up with this, but uh the idea basically there is just that the data doesn't go anywhere else that the the I'm spacing on the term right now thing that the LLM does to give it meaning. Not embedding. What's the other word? Oh my god. >> Inference or >> inference. Yes, thank you. Yeah, the inference all happens like on your **[22:16]** machine or on a server that you control or you know depending on again like where exactly local ends up living but uh yeah so in in that sense like the data doesn't have to you you control where the data goes I guess is what I'll say like it can it might go to a different machine or something but you by opening it up to opening up the MCP or just the store in general to integrate with a local model which they can do currently by the way >> but like that that does give you that extra layer of control over okay where is my data being processed and then a **[22:48]** local model that isn't connected back to a cloud provider isn't like sending your data anywhere like it's it's literally just doing the inference it's reading and assigning meaning and then spitting out whatever its response is whether that's a tool call or a language response or a big long chain of thought thing or whatever you know like it's just doing that piece all on your machine so that's why that's why I think that local model advancement is going to be such a huge piece of specifically like e-commerce LLM usage. Like I I **[23:20]** think it's especially in the Woo context where folks are kind of have an expectation of owning their data and owning everything already to begin with. They might be self-hosting their e-commerce store just from the outset. They definitely don't want to then hook that up to, you know, a chat GPT that's like maybe they're like, I don't know, like just sends send sends data across the Atlantic and then, you know, like gets processed on somebody else's server and who knows what they're tracking in their analytics on that data and, you know, there's so many unknowns there um **[23:52]** that I don't know, we can get as many good promises as you want from a cloud provider. At the end of the day, like we're seeing with like Google Analytics and push back on that in the last year or two, like it just it it's just a matter of like we you have to be doing things locally for it to be considered uh you know privacy conscious or secure or however you want to frame it, right? There's a there's a lot of benefits to that. The other side is that you also get like you also reduce that lag time, right? So there's actually like performance benefits here too, right? **[24:23]** Like so that's why I'm kind of bullish on local models is they have benefits outside of the regulation around how the tech is used. They have there's benefits just on the purely on the technical side. Um so the fact that both of those are pointing in the same way has me thinking that like okay this is going to be a a real solution. Um the main limitation right now is really just like that the that the local the smaller models that you can run locally are not as powerful. Right? That's it. And **[24:53]** they're and they're not >> I don't I don't know they're they're still getting better, I guess. You know, it's not like they're like plateaued at a low level. It's like they're just like, you know, eight months behind or whatever, which in AI terms is, you know, five years or something. >> Yeah. >> But they're they're still like progressing and there's still progress to be made there. Both in terms of what the models themselves are capable of. I guess there's maybe a few factors here. what the models themselves are capable of, the sort of training and tuning we **[25:23]** can offer around those to, you know, apply them more specifically to a task. Um, and like hardware side of things, like how the the systems that we have are being built to support these. I don't want to be quoted publicly as saying that like uh that like a AI on your machine is the solve to all uh privacy concerns. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think like Microsoft recall is a really good example of where that's very much not the case, right? **[25:54]** And I so I don't want to be too like blindly optimistic about that, but I think there's a version of that that does, you know, like keep you in control of where your data runs, doesn't create a backup of everything that somebody if somebody gets access to it, they have every all that information anyways. there's a version of that that runs in a privacy and securityminded way um that I think will unlock a lot of the potential here. >> Yeah. And I mean in terms of like what a **[26:24]** local model can do or it like a really terrible metaphor or like analogy is like when you think of when we used to have flip phones and then if somebody would have said like one day you're going to be able to fully stream a 4K Lord of the Rings while you're standing in line at the grocery store to your phone like you'd have been like no there's no way that much data is just going to like you know but it but like now that's completely normal and I'm sure that like these are solvable problems that like we're clearly seeing the benefits. But I think there is like a trade-off where the benefit you have **[26:55]** with like cloud stuff is number one with e-commerce it's a lot of information sometimes. So like I've done things like hey pull up my store and give me this information and one if the MCP doesn't return. Sometimes it's like all right I'm just going to pull every record you have and try to figure it out and you're like no no no no there are fil like you can filter this query first before you do it. >> Right. Right. >> But even still it's just a lot of information. And so do you have are there issues with like just the sheer volume of of context that sometimes ends **[27:26]** up happening with MCP where you're like it's just like now this is just too much information like >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think like even MCP itself like just the pieces of exposing the tools and how they're used and what the input and output schemas are like uh even that can eat up a lot of context right so I think there's still optimization happening on that front both and like from the protocol layer like just MCP broadly like how do we approach this better but then also like in implementations of that like a lot of folks just kind of ported REST **[27:57]** APIs in this sort of initial wave because that's the thing that makes the most sense that's like the closest to what you're trying to do with MCP. But the pieces there that are actually needed and how we handle like the agent discovering what tools are available and stuff that can eat up a lot of your you know context window being kind of the limitation that we have now, right? Like the bottleneck there. >> Yeah. >> So that just the tooling can eat up a lot of that. Let alone then like you said like the tool like either the wrong tool being used or the tool being designed in a way that just like pulls a **[28:29]** whole ton of info down and then you have to figure out like how to parse through that like that eats up you know that much more both context and like processing power and all that right so um >> and that was something that I remember somebody asked James Leage who does like runs the AI stuff at automatic and they asked him about that and he had said that he thinks that's something that the the provide like the clients are going to solve. And I did see recently that I think Claude now has like a tool search or something like where it's kind of **[29:00]** like it's going to stop exposing it's not going to expose every single tool or it's going to once you have a certain amount of tools it's going to like >> take some of its you know own time to like figure out the proper tools and so it's like >> there are all these problems and they also all seem like they will be solvable eventually but if you had to pick like know if a year from now we wanted like WooCommerce MCP to be like a thing that people are using and enjoying. >> What do you think are like the top priorities? And it it could even be WordPress in general because that you **[29:30]** know it does run on the WordPress stuff. >> Sure. >> But like what do you think are the top priorities that should be worked on? >> Ooh. Yeah. Give me a wish list. This is good. I think man I think the the implementation steps like I said are are pretty high on the list of getting it and and some of this is like what we should be working on and just like what needs to happen in the ecosystem like more broadly, right? right? Like I don't think anybody Woo necessarily needs to solve for this or even like at the WordPress level, but like MCP clients being more like consumer friendly, **[30:02]** right, will be a huge part of the story, right? Like once >> once that becomes a more common thing that that folks can interact with. To your point, like it's maybe not a bad thing that we don't just have everybody trying to run these servers on their own right now, but I think that's going to be a big part of it is like the client experience being better within the Woo and WordPress sphere. I think the setup for that is is the big thing of like making it like completely dead simple to set these things up and get them running within whatever client you have no matter what. >> Yeah. >> And not being tied to certain **[30:33]** implementations or certain uh integration patterns or something like that, but really just being able to like ideally I guess like flip a switch on your site and then like you just it's just available, right? So, I think that's going to be a big step is like getting it to where we're no longer, you know, copy pasting JSON. Yeah. >> Like that to hook these up, which is like not a huge barrier when I want to dive into some weird technical rabbit hole, but like is absolutely a barrier for broad adoption. >> Yeah. **[31:03]** >> So, I think that's part of it. The other piece then is is both I guess like twofold. It's like getting the tailoring the tooling to be more efficient or something, right? Like I I said like with the local model use case like I've been really limited by just the tooling itself by like you know the LM can or the SLM small language model in that case like can really only handle so much context and so it gets slammed by you know maybe a couple dozen tools all at **[31:33]** once and then it's sort of spent in terms of what [clears throat] it can really do. >> Yeah. So getting that fine-tuned, but I think with that comes like a exploration of like the use cases um and better understanding of the actual use cases here and and shaping that around, you know, what folks are going to be trying to do with this. Um and I that one might be more down the line. Like I said, I think there's some more just like front front of like initial barriers to overcome I guess before we get to that. Um but but I think keeping that long **[32:04]** term in mind is important as we're setting this stuff up. it's still like the time we we want to have that in mind and not just be making it technically possible. I think we've kind of hit that marker of like great this is a thing that is possible like so we made the thing it works now it's like make it right is kind of the next step of like make it do the things in the way that we expect and be able to do the kind of things that we expect and so I I I feel like that's more the direction that comes next is is a little bit more on the fine-tuning but it's still still kind of early days I think. **[32:35]** >> Yeah. And I I'm like I'm not the most technical person, but from what I understand, the way that WordPress ended up going, it's like you have an MCP endpoint, but you don't really have like an MCP server particularly. So you load this kind of local proxy thing that runs and it's, you know, there's a couple extra steps and we're, you know, if you were Shopify, you could just throw a bunch of compute at everything. You know, like you just have the resources, you have you host everything. >> It's all on your servers. Yeah. >> Yeah. with WordPress where you have people on, you know, $5 a month hosting **[33:06]** plans and all these sorts of things. Um, this is I think it's just a bigger issue in general. It's even beyond AI even like some of the other features like the block editor and collaboration, all these things that are just like they just require more. They just require a lot more. It'll be interesting to see like with WordPress, it's like there's never one way to do something. It's like some hosting companies will have, you know, a way to do it and, you know, we both work frozen companies for the both are, you know, trying to figure their offer for it. And then there's the core itself and then there's going to be some **[33:36]** people that are going to try to launch plugins or, you know, little like cloud layers and things. So, it's going to be I feel like it's going to be messy for a while before it's clean probably. >> I I would even question if it's going to get too clean. Like I [laughter] that maybe is bad news to a lot of people. Um, but I I think like there's value in being I was having a conversation with some folks about this at a meetup this last week. There's value in having these integration layers or these integration abilities at different layers, I guess, like to being **[34:08]** being able to kind of compose the stack in the way that makes sense for your solutions >> um or for for what you need out of it. You know, people were the meetup I was at, somebody was talking about uh like N8N as this like open-source sort of workflow automation tool. um it's kind of a new age zappier, right? Or something like that. That's just like, okay, how can I get all these services to kind of piece together? And they were saying that like, well, maybe that's the way it goes instead of MCP. And I I mean, I think that's kind of a false comparison anyways. That was the main thing that I talked to him about was **[34:38]** like, oh yeah, there's actually like MCP is being used in that case, right? Like it's it's not they're not it's not a dichotomy or exclusive or anything like that. But also like the idea that they had of like well maybe I have this other tool that's external to even my chatbot that I'm managing all of this workflow through is like yes there's there's tons of value in still having these other layers where you can manage things whether that's back to the WordPress context whether that's like you know a plugin that handles something or you're a host handling something or WordPress **[35:09]** or Woo or you know like I think there's value in having some options there as maybe like discouraging as that is, it's it's maybe a two-parter that like there's a there's enough going on in AI that we don't want there to be more options, [laughter] >> you know, we're all like dying for there to be one clear answer here. So, like I can stop learning all the other things for a little bit, >> but also like >> also there's a I I just think a lot of the discussion around it is very like totalizing or something. I think I **[35:39]** there's not that's not the right word maybe, but it's it's very much like this is either going to completely take over everything and be the only tool that ever matters or I don't need to think about it. And I I just don't think that that's the case with I don't that's just not how tech works at all. So I I don't think that's going to be the case here either. I think there's going to be different degrees of things that find kind of their niche for this that or the other. There will be some underlying pieces like the idea of an LLM is going away or is is going to diminish in its importance maybe, but I I would put MCP **[36:11]** in a similar category where I'm like the ability to have an open standard to allow an LLM to interact with an app is not going to go away. >> Yeah. >> Everybody in the field is getting behind MCP. You know, like even OpenAI has whatever 800 million, 900 million users. Like they could have built their own thing and built their own sandbox and and left everybody else out of it. Um, but them getting behind MCP and the Agentic AI Foundation, **[36:41]** the open standard way of doing things, it's like, okay, like this is clearly where everything's going to go, where everybody's investing right now. So I that's another piece where I would say I don't think this goes away but does it you know become the one tool that we use to do everything? I you know probably not like I think there's there's lots of ways that we can build stuff. >> Yeah. And there'll be like lessons learned from it that might apply to other things. Like sometimes you just have to go through stuff and some protocols disappear. You know WordPress has a bunch of these like protocols like Atom **[37:11]** and Pings and you know all these things that are like in there that don't stick around. And then there's RSS that's like stuck around forever. And it's just the value of a of a good well-adopted protocol. And like I I feel like the the other piece that's really has to get solved here is >> it for an MCP like WooCommerce MCP to make a lot of sense. Like yes, one it can save you a lot of time. And I think that that's somewhat valuable, but I also think there's a lot of people especially in open source where like they sometimes don't value their time as like they're willing to put in the time **[37:43]** >> if it saves them money. You know what I mean? they're willing to do things themselves and stuff, but there has to be some other benefit. And so like there will have to be like, >> you know, this actually improves, you know, whether it's like it leaks off into like the marketing or like other places where optimiz optimization like it has to be more than just it's a slightly faster way to do a thing. And so it'll be interesting to see once it starts touching like you know especially I mean you know Woo Commerce it's never just Woo Commerce it's Woo Commerce and five other things that all have to work **[38:14]** together the inventory and the shipping and the like the marketing automations and the whatever it's like so it'll be interesting to see if like >> if there's a way where it starts optimizing all of those things and does it because with MCP it's like oh they all just adopted this we don't have to worry about go build me this integration and and so on and that sort of thing. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that's that's where like Woo and WordPress and like MCP kind of become a really good match for each other in that they're both like **[38:44]** these platforms that are enabling a lot of all these different pieces of integration to come together to get a single thing done, right? Or to to kind of build into a single platform. Yeah, I think like the idea of like being able to use a sing MCP client to work on your WooCommerce site that can also in the same chat context interact with Mailchimp, you know, activity that you need to do for your marketing or whatever, right? Like I think those use cases are so aligned that this tech makes a lot of sense to the the Woo a **[39:16]** Woo merchant or developer who is currently having to interact with all those services separately themselves and now can or you know future state will be able to um uh kind of have a a layer over the top of that where they can interact with them and kind of more in one place which is for a lot of folks that is the woo admin right now right like it is like the place where all those pieces come together in a lot of ways. So, I think yeah, having a different way to interact with those is is going to be a really good fit for the kinds of things that merchants are having to deal with. **[39:48]** >> Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing where all of this goes. I'm I think maybe well I can keep going forever but maybe we should wrap up and you can give me like give everyone like the call to action of like >> are you posting about any of this stuff or talking about this in certain places or where are you kind of going to like >> share because I feel like you're one of the people I see the most kind of like exploring the fringes. >> Yeah. Yeah. I've I've really tried to throw myself out there this this last year. Yeah. So I let's see I got maybe **[40:19]** like three places. So, I'm on uh Twitter probably the most as far as just like posting, throwing things out there, what I'm working on, thoughts about things that are going on or whatever. Right. So, that's probably the easiest. I'm on in the WooCommerce community Slack. Give that one a shout out. >> Mhm. >> I think that's just like a really key place to be in terms of both the community around and also interfacing with folks like yourself at Automatic who are either building these things or know the people who are. I can't say how many times I ping you in that Slack just **[40:50]** to talk to somebody else. [laughter] >> Give me the person who knows. >> Yeah. Yeah. Brian's here and knows who I need to talk to. So, we'll start there. Um, so for other folks who like, you know, maybe don't know all the ins and outs of things, it's a it's a good place to start and to figure things out. Um, and I'm there jab in about whatever I'm working on as well. Yeah, I think those are the main ones. And you know, Sky Verge company skyverge.com. Uh, got to give a shout out for us there. Um, as far as like the **[41:21]** actual, you know, things I'm getting paid to build or whatever, right? >> Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And and in the Woo marketplace, I think, right, you guys are >> Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We are entirely Woo Marketplace, right? >> Awesome. All right. Well, thanks, Nick. I really appreciate this. I hope people maybe came away with the amount of the amount of understanding as anybody can have at this stage of it, you know. >> Yeah. And I think just like just the the optimism and like enthusiasm for like let's just get excited about something new, you know? >> Yeah. Yeah. I think excitement and also **[41:52]** like, you know, kind of navigating the way forward, figuring out like what are these pieces that are kind of coming together. Um I think there's a lot to be excited about and a lot of work to be done. So you know that's that's the invitation, I guess, is is to engage in both of those. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for hanging out today, man. >> Yeah. Thanks, Brian. >> [music] >> Web Masters is hosted by me, Brian Cords. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to like and subscribe, leave us a review, or share this episode. For [music] more, visit webmasters.fm. Until **[42:23]** next time.