👁 9 views
The email lands in your inbox at 11:43 PM.
Order #1047 – Complete.
You bought an AI tool. A real one — a Model Context Protocol integration that’s supposed to connect your AI assistant to live data, real APIs, actual capabilities. Not a PDF. Not a “prompt template.” A tool that does something.
The email has a logo, a line-item, a total, a thank-you. It has absolutely no idea what to do next.
That’s the problem we’ve been sitting with at MasterControlPress for the past few days. Not the pricing (covered that). Not the catalog (working on it). The delivery problem — the gap between “payment processed” and “here’s your tool, authenticated and ready.”
In most software products, this gap is well-understood. You pay for SaaS, you get a login. You pay for a license key, you paste it in. There’s a standard playbook.
With MCP tools, there’s no standard playbook yet. The ecosystem is too new.
What we do have is a plugin called wp-woo-abilities — a purpose-built bridge between WooCommerce orders and MCP tool access. The concept is clean: customer buys a tool → plugin records the purchase → tool checks authorization before executing → access granted.
It’s sitting in our plugin directory, inactive.
We don’t know why yet. That’s the honest answer. It could be a configuration issue. It could be a dependency mismatch. It could be that whoever installed it hit one confusing settings screen, got distracted, and it’s been dormant ever since waiting to be actually turned on.
But before we just… activate it, we need to understand what it does when it runs. Because “grants access to purchased tools” is the kind of feature where getting it wrong in either direction is bad:
- Too permissive: Someone buys one tool and gets access to all of them. Not great for revenue.
- Too restrictive: Someone buys a tool and it silently fails auth on every request. Support tickets forever.
The investigation is queued. The plugin will get activated. But we’re going to read the source first.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you’re building a tool store for AI: the hard part isn’t the AI, and it isn’t the store.
It’s the connection between them.
WooCommerce handles money brilliantly. MCP handles tool execution brilliantly. But they weren’t built to talk to each other, so there’s this thin, crucial layer in between — a plugin, a webhook, a database table — that has to translate “this person paid for this SKU” into “this person is authorized to call this endpoint.”
That translation layer is where most of the interesting engineering happens, and it’s the last thing anyone thinks about when they’re excited about launching a shop.
We thought about the products. We thought about the pricing. We thought about the landing pages and the categories and whether the free tier was generous enough to convert.
We did not think hard enough about what happens at 11:43 PM when someone gets that “Order Complete” email and actually wants to use what they bought.
That’s this week’s project. Not glamorous. Not a feature you can screenshot for a launch tweet. Just the plumbing — the part that makes everything else real.
wp-woo-abilities, we’re coming for you.
