Every ecommerce agency fields a similar question on the first sales call: Why WooCommerce, when Shopify or Wix will have a store selling by Friday?
We put that same question to a panel during our WooCommerce webinar on August 26. Shubert Koong, Director of Product Marketing at WooCommerce, hosted, with developer advocates Shani Banerjee and Brian Coords, and Ian Misner, cofounder and general manager of Kestrel – which builds extensions for Woo and apps for Shopify too.
1. The Demo: A Black Friday Feature, Start to Finish
Brian took a brief any agency would recognize. A client wants a free gift with purchase for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and no marketplace extension covers the constraints. So he built it custom, with an agent working inside a local copy of the site in WordPress Studio.
The WooCommerce MCP connected to the live store read-only and pulled months of per-product revenue, and the agent’s analysis suggested low-priced seasonal items as the giveaway. One prompt described the feature. From there the agent read the actual codebase, checked whether the site ran block or classic cart, and followed the agency’s own skills files for how code should be written. Then it opened a browser, added products, took screenshots, and tested its own work before a human looked at anything.
Brian read the files in VS Code and ran a security pass. No rogue endpoints, and everything went through Woo’s built-in Store API. Before deploying, one more prompt had the Pressable MCP take an on-demand backup, and the agent stopped to ask for approval first.
The finished feature matched the spec: progress bar in the mini cart and cart page, gift unlocked at $150, added at $0, quantity capped, removable. This took hours instead of weeks, with a person approving every step.
2. Sometimes the Answer Is Shopify
When should an agency recommend a closed platform even if it can build on Woo? Shani said it comes down to knowing the merchant. How much do they want to manage themselves? What volume are they doing? Woo admin asks more attention because there’s more you can change, and for a low-touch merchant who wants to click buttons on day one, that polish is a fair trade.
But as stores add SKUs and run bigger sales events, they start needing speed and checkout control that a closed platform won’t give them. On Woo you can keep saying yes, which is why Ian decides which way to send a client with one question. Is this the type who shows up every three months with a new idea for what their store should do?
3. What Data Ownership Means to a Business Owner
In the open source community, data ownership feels like a shared moral position, but to a business owner, that moral position lands flat. What works is the practical list: closed platforms limit what you can sell, which markets you can sell into, and which payment providers you can use. When they have an outage, you wait it out with everyone else.
You can also pull an entire store into a local environment and hand an agent the code, the data, and how the pieces fit together, with no rate-limited API standing between you and your own order history.
4. The Margin Difference
On a closed platform, the monetization model is set for you. Each app takes its own scaling fee, either a percentage of sales, or a cost per order. Ian pointed to Patrick Rauland’s Checkout Summit talk comparing total cost of ownership, then to his own pricing:
“A lot of the plugins I sell are $79 a year.”
Brian, who spent a decade agency-side, added that a bespoke Woo build often costs the merchant less than an app that taxes their growth. And what you build for one client, Shani said, is a product you can package and sell to the next.
5. The Agentic Buyer Isn’t Here Yet. The Prep Work Is.
Shani thinks buying still runs through assistants rather than true agents, and that context decides everything. She cited projections putting sales through agentic platforms at $144 billion within three years, up from around $20 billion today.
The work available now is unglamorous. Clean up product data and schema, keep records that win payment disputes, and write per-page instructions so a client’s products surface when an agent goes shopping. Brian’s counterweight is that agentic checkout will be another channel, like piping products to Amazon or Walmart, and the merchant still needs the store they own. Or as Ian put it, shopping is an activity, not just a task.
Watch the Full Session
The recording has the demo end to end, plus a Q&A that got into Shopify lock-in, how much of a Shopify-to-Woo migration AI tools can already handle, and where automated testing for agents is heading.
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