I have some very innovative ideas for WPBay. Don’t freak out, I don’t want to implement an AI tool which would build AI slop plugins for users (and rob the sales of plugins submitted to WPBay by you guys), but instead, my ideas are more about how to increase sales for current products.
One thing I am looking at pretty seriously is MCP and AI agents.
Right now, when somebody needs a WordPress plugin, they search Google, browse marketplaces, ask in a Facebook group, search Reddit or maybe ask ChatGPT/Claude what they should use.
I think this is going to change soon, so instead of people browsing through 50 plugins themselves, they will simply tell an AI agent something like:
“I need a WooCommerce plugin which can do X, Y and Z, works with subscriptions and costs less than $50.”
The agent will do the research, but I think that it will also purchase the plugin and install it and set it up on the user’s website.
I know that there is a risk for this idea, as the AI could go ahead and just implement the plugin by itself, however, in case of large plugins, this should be much more expensive in token costs and also come with more security risk than simply purchasing a battle tested plugin from a marketplace and set it up fast - AI agents should soon realize this also.
So my thinking is: why shouldn’t WPBay be directly accessible to these agents? Preferably, this should be done in the simplest way possible for agents.
For example, WPBay could have an MCP interface where an AI agent can search available products, read their features, pricing, compatibility, reviews, documentation, update history, trial availability, etc.
Instead of hoping that ChatGPT somehow discovers a WPBay page through Google, this would give agents a door into the marketplace.
Later this could go even further. Agents could compare products, check whether a plugin matches what the user needs, recommend it and send the buyer directly to the product/checkout page or even purchase the product directly and download it, activate it’s purchase code and set it up fully for the user.
There is also a bigger idea behind this. Most of people today optimize products for Google. Tomorrow we will need to optimize products also for agents (there is an irony here, as everybody tells us that wow, how smart AI agents are, but then they also tell you that they need special page optimizations, so the agents can easily read the pages…). So, product descriptions, documentation and product meta information must become something machines need to understand just as much as humans do.
And if AI agents become one of the ways people discover and buy software, we need WPBay to be early on this trend.
Obviously there are a lot of questions around this. How much access should agents have? Should sellers be able to control what information is exposed? How do we prevent bad recommendations? Could agents eventually purchase software for users (I personally think this is also a must-have thing)? Will this fit into all the EU regulations out there? What standards will actually win: MCP, ACP, UCP, something else which doesn’t even exist yet?
Let me know what you think of this idea.