WooCommerce catalog API for AI shopping agents

A free WooCommerce plugin that exposes your live catalog as a structured REST API for AI shopping agents. No LLM, no cloud, no external service — everything runs on your server.

All catalog endpoints read directly from the WooCommerce database at query time. Price changes, stock updates and new products are immediately reflected — no sync, no snapshot, no delay.

Installation

1. Download kalicart-bridge-1.0.149.zip
2. Upload and activate from WP Admin → Plugins → Add New → Upload
3. WooCommerce must be active — the plugin checks and alerts if it is not
4. On activation, all signals are enabled by default (badge, robots.txt, sitemap)
5. Visit WP Admin → KaliCart to see the catalog health dashboard

Endpoints

All endpoints under /wp-json/kalicart/v1/.

Discovery document

The single entry point. Key fields an agent must read:

• kalicart_agent_catalog.taxonomy — always merchant_native_woocommerce. Read /catalog/categories to enumerate them.
• public_catalog.query_construction — critical rules for building search queries correctly.
• public_catalog.search_filters — accepted parameters with allowed values.
• merchant_shipping_policy — declarative shipping zones, methods and free-shipping thresholds.
• coupon_policy.price_rule — coupons are always conditional checkout savings; never replace price.current.
• agent_instructions — ordered steps the agent must follow.

// Minimal agent bootstrap
GET /wp-json/kalicart/v1/discovery
→ read public_catalog.* for all endpoint URLs
→ read merchant_shipping_policy for shipping reasoning
→ read agent_instructions for query rules

Search & filters

The most important rule: q must contain only the bare product noun. Every other attribute must go in its own structured filter.

Available filters

Correct vs wrong

✓ correct
GET /catalog/search?q=sneakers&gender=male&max_price=120&in_stock=true
GET /catalog/search?q=jacket&category=outerwear&color=black

✗ wrong — attributes stacked in q → 0 results
GET /catalog/search?q=blue+men+sneakers+under+100

Zero results recovery

• Retry with a barer q — drop attributes out of q into their filters
• GET /catalog/categories to find the correct category slug
• Only report "not available" after bare-spine + category-browse both return 0

Product payload

Price

• price.encoding: decimal_major_units — values are decimal floats in full currency units (e.g. 29.99 = 29.99 EUR). Not ISO 4217 minor units.
• price.display: plain-text formatted string (e.g. "29,99 €") — unambiguous, use for presentation.
• price.vat_included: whether prices include VAT per WooCommerce tax settings.
• price.price_type: STATIC for standard products. Aligned with KaliCart Global format.
• list_price: original list price before discounts (simple products only).

• price.current — the authoritative catalog price. Always use this for commerce decisions.
• price.on_sale, price.discount_pct — sale state and percentage off regular price.
• Variable products return price.type: "range" with min_regular, max_regular, min_sale, max_sale.

Stock

• stock.in_stock — boolean, check before presenting any offer.
• stock.availability_status — UCP-standard values: in_stock, out_of_stock, backorder.
• stock.quantity — numeric if the merchant manages stock quantity; null otherwise.
• stock.quantity_tracked — boolean, whether merchant manages numeric stock.
• stock.backorder_allowed — boolean, true if backorder is notify or yes.
• stock.confidence — numeric_stock_quantity (exact count), availability_status_only (merchant does not expose quantity — treat as available, not as confirmed inventory), or variant_dependent (select a variation first).
• stock.agent_note — present when confidence is not numeric_stock_quantity. Read it before reporting availability.

Computed attributes

• gender — inferred from pa_gender attribute, category path keywords, tags, product name. null if indeterminate.
• colors[] — color families mapped from pa_color / pa_colore. Each entry has family and raw.
• sizes — extracted from pa_size / pa_taglia. Type auto-detected: clothing, numeric or shoes.

Purchase readiness

• purchase_readiness.status — direct_cart_possible (simple in-stock product, use checkout_url directly) or variant_selection_required (variable product, user must select a variant first).
• purchase_readiness.blocking_fields[] — attributes the user must choose before checkout (e.g. ["size"]).
• purchase_readiness.can_add_to_cart_directly — boolean shortcut.

Variants & Variations

• variants[] — always an array, never null. Product detail: variable products expose all variations with attributes, price, in_stock, availability_status, sku, barcodes; simple products expose a single entry with the product's own data. List and search responses: simple products keep their single entry, variable products return an empty array for performance — fetch /catalog/product/{id} for the full variants list.
• variations[] — alias for variable products only (backward compat).
• Pass variation_id in checkout session payload when creating a session for a variable product.
• availability_status — UCP-standard values: in_stock, out_of_stock, backorder. Present on both product stock and each variant.
• list_price — original list price before discounts (strikethrough). Present on simple products; null on variable (price varies per variant).
• barcodes[] — industry-standard identifiers (EAN, GTIN, UPC) read from WooCommerce product meta. Empty array if not set by merchant.

Metadata

• metadata.purchase_readiness — same as top-level purchase_readiness, exposed here for UCP-compatible agents that read metadata.
• metadata.stock_confidence — confidence level of stock data.
• metadata.bridge_version — plugin version that generated this response.

Shipping zones

shipping.zones[] exposes the full WooCommerce shipping configuration: zone name, country/region codes, methods (free_shipping, flat_rate, local_pickup) with costs and free shipping threshold. Computed once per request and cached. Authoritative shipping cost is always WooCommerce checkout.

Checkout

checkout_url — direct add-to-cart for simple in-stock products. Product page for variable products where variant selection is required.

For multi-product flows use Checkout Sessions below.

Shipping & coupons

Shipping

The discovery document contains merchant_shipping_policy — a snapshot of the WooCommerce shipping zones, methods and free-shipping thresholds. Each product also carries a shipping field with product-level context (class, weight, free-shipping eligibility at current price). WooCommerce checkout is the final authority for destination-specific costs.

Coupons

Each product carries active_coupons[] — active coupons applicable to that product or category. Never replace price.current with a coupon-adjusted value. Present the catalog price; offer the code as a conditional saving at checkout.

Each coupon entry includes combinable_with_sale: "unknown — verify at checkout" and verification_required: true. A coupon is confirmed only after the WooCommerce cart/checkout accepts it and changes totals. Coupons may be combinable with sale prices, but only checkout can confirm this.

// Correct agent presentation
"Price is €89. Use code SAVE20 at checkout for 20% off (≈ €17 saving)."

// Wrong
"Price is €71.20"  ← never compute coupon into price

Checkout sessions (optional)

When enabled by the merchant, agents can create checkout sessions containing one or more products. Each session returns two URLs for the user — no OAuth, no PII, no payment on the agent side.

Session response

• cart_url — one click: adds all items to cart, lands on WooCommerce cart page. User reviews before paying.
• checkout_url — one click: adds all items to cart, redirects directly to checkout.
• subtotal — sum of all item totals at catalog prices. Does not include shipping or coupons.
• Session expires in 30 minutes. Status transitions: pending → cart_loaded.

// Multi-product session
POST /checkout/session
{
  "items": [
    { "product_id": 1326, "quantity": 1, "variation_id": 1477 },  // required for variable products
    { "product_id": 1307, "quantity": 2 }
  ]
}
→ { "cart_url": "...", "checkout_url": "...", "subtotal": 651 }

Agent signals

All four signals are injected automatically on activation — no manual code required.

Federated Catalog

An optional, open discovery network. The Bridge makes your catalog readable by agents that are already on your domain; the Federated Catalog makes it discoverable by agents that don't know your store yet. Opt-in, separate service, revocable at any time.

Two distinct discovery paths — easy to conflate, so worth stating plainly:

How it works, end to end:

Revoking is symmetric: untick consent and the plugin signals KaliCart Global to deregister; your catalog is parked and leaves federated results, while direct agent access to your store stays active.

Provider authorization

A further, separate opt-in on top of the Federated Catalog: authorizing KaliCart Global to deliver your public catalog onward to one specific named external provider — for example a product-discovery or agentic-commerce pilot run by a company like OpenAI. Distinct from Federated Catalog membership above and from the direct merchant feed (ChatGPT Feed tab); none of the three implies the others.

Three separate things, easy to conflate:

What's shared: only your public commercial catalog data, the same product information already exposed by the Bridge. Never customer, order, payment or credential data.

Current status: the first provider, OpenAI's product-discovery pilot, is defined in the protocol and can be authorized today, but is not yet operationally enabled — no catalog data is delivered to it until KaliCart Global turns delivery on. Authorizing now records your consent and starts the audit trail; it does not make your products visible on that provider's service yet.

Every grant or revocation is receipted: a hash-chained, append-only local log entry. When the installation identity is verified, Bridge signs the receipt with that installation’s existing key and KaliCart Global verifies it directly, without depending on access to your discovery endpoint. Older Global versions or an unavailable local identity use the discovery-verified compatibility path; a rejected signature is never bypassed through that path. Revoking is fail-safe — delivery is suspended immediately, before verification even completes — and is independent of your Federated Catalog and direct-feed settings.

Protocol and endpoint reference for developers: KaliCart Global — Provider authorization. Legal text: KaliCart Global Terms of Use · KaliCart Global Privacy Notice · KaliCart Bridge Privacy Notice.

Catalog health dashboard

Real-time catalog quality report from WP Admin → KaliCart.

• Quality score — 0–100 weighted average across all products based on issue severity.
• Quality signals — products with high or medium severity issues (missing description, zero price, no category). Nothing is blocked: these products stay fully served to agents, but the issues travel as declared quality flags and lower the score. Each entry links directly to the WP product edit screen.
• Soft alerts — missing images and missing SKUs appear as low-priority suggestions and do not count as quality signals.
• Suggestions — prioritized list of catalog improvements with affected product count.