The Website World Shop API and shop MCP give wholesalers, distributors and merchants a price-aware ordering interface that retailers, outlets and everyday customers can use from their own systems or their own AI assistant, with the same prices, visibility and rules as your Website World shop.
Read the MCP guide | Read the REST API guide
The problem it solves
Trade customers rarely want to browse a catalogue page by page. A cafe owner wants to say “reorder last month’s coffee and add two cartons of oat milk”. A retailer’s buyer wants your price list inside their own purchasing system. A member of the public wants to ask an assistant “what do you have under $100, and can it arrive by Friday?”
Until now, that meant phone calls, emailed spreadsheets and re-keyed orders. With Website World’s shop API, the shop is on the customer’s side of the conversation, and every answer is still your price, your stock rules and your terms.
One shop, four ways in
Retailers and outlets
Connect a purchasing system to the REST API. Download the product feed with each customer’s own prices, then send orders straight back. No re-keying, no mistakes.
Signed-in customers
Give their AI assistant the shop MCP address. They sign in once, choose what the assistant may do, and it can search, price, order, book and repeat past orders for them.
Visitors
Anyone can ask their assistant about your shop through the public MCP: no sign-in, public prices only, plus a way to send you an enquiry.
Website
The traditional way to connect with your business.
Prices that are always the right prices
Wholesale lives and dies on pricing, so the interface never guesses. Each customer is shown the price they would really pay, worked out by your shop’s own calculation:
- Their price group, quantity breaks, sale prices, live discounts and promo codes.
- Their currency, with tax shown the way your shop shows it.
- Shipping options calculated for their delivery address, including pick up.
Their member level and groups decide which products and categories they can see at all. If a customer is not allowed to see a price, no amount is returned and the product cannot be ordered through the assistant. Cost prices, supplier details and other customers’ trade prices are never exposed.
For retailers and distributors’ systems: the REST API
| Endpoint | What it is for |
|---|---|
GET /shop-api/products |
A product feed with the calling customer’s own prices, paged for large catalogues, with updated_since so a system can sync only what changed. |
POST /shop-api/orders |
Create and submit an order in one call. An Idempotency-Key makes retries safe, and an optional expected_total refuses the order if the price has moved. |
GET /shop-api/orders |
Read the customer’s own orders: status, totals, balance owing, delivery and tracking. |
For AI assistants: the shop MCP
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard AI assistants use to connect to services. Point an assistant at your shop’s address and it can do these things on behalf of one signed-in customer:
| Capability | What the assistant can do |
|---|---|
| Browse and search | Categories, product search and full product detail: variants, colours and sizes, customisation questions and booking products. |
| Draft an order | Build an order and get the final price back from your shop’s own calculation, with any errors or warnings listed line by line. |
| Submit an order | Place it with the total the customer agreed to. If the price has moved, nothing is submitted and the new total is shown. |
| Repeat and review | Read past orders and start a new draft from one at today’s prices. |
| 予約 | Check availability and book appointments, hire items, rooms and seats using your booking rules. |
| Profile and contact | Keep delivery details current and send you a message from the customer’s own account. |
| キャンセル | Cancel an order where your cancellation rules allow it. |
What a conversation looks like
You stay in control
- Customers choose the permissions. Browse, read orders, draft, submit, cancel and contact are separate permissions. Submitting is the only one that commits the customer to buying, and an assistant can be given less than it asks for.
- Your rules apply. Minimum spend, stock, who may buy what, shipping and cancellation rules are checked when an order is drafted and again when it is submitted.
- You review orders. Orders arrive like any other. You review and approve them, and payment follows your own terms. Unpaid orders carry a link to pay by your payment methods.
- Everything is logged. Every request is recorded against the customer and the application they used, so you can see what was done on their behalf.
- Customers can be cut off. A connection can be revoked, and it stops working if the customer’s account is disabled or the website is not live.
- Secure sign-in. Customers sign in with their own account for your website using OAuth with PKCE, including two-factor sign-in where they use it. Assistants never see their password.
Getting started
- Nothing to build. It is built into every Website World shop. The API lives on your own domain at
/shop-api/and uses the customers, prices and products you already manage in Website World. - Give your customers the address. For assistants it is
https://your-domain/shop-api/mcp/. Assistants that support MCP find the sign-in on their own. - Developers read the REST guide at
/shop-api/. Both guides are readable by people and by machines.
Not signed in? Visitors can use https://myname.co.nz/shop-api/mcp/public to ask about your products at public prices and send you an enquiry, protected by spam checks and rate limits. You can turn it off for your website.
Why Website World
Website World already runs your products, price groups, members, bookings, shipping and checkout. The Shop API and MCP are not a separate system to keep in step: they are another door into the same shop, so a price changed once is changed everywhere. Website World: one shop, every way your customers want to buy.
