CloudCart Lets Merchants Run Their Online Stores Through Claude and ChatGPT

Forget the admin panel. Just ask a chatbot! The Bulgarian online shopping platform CloudCart now allows store owners to connect AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini directly to their online stores. A new MCP server lets these assistants create products, check stock reports and perform other store management tasks. They can only do what the store owner allows them to do. The Sofia-based company is celebrating its 10th anniversary with this launch. It is also offering a special deal that removes card payment processing fees until the end of the year.

Manage Your Store by Giving Instructions

The new connection works through CloudCart's developer platform, cloudcart.dev. Store owners and their technical partners can connect AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and the coding tool Cursor to their stores using an MCP server and command-line tools. These tools can handle everyday tasks, but they can also help create custom designs, add new features and connect stores to software made by other companies. This means store owners do not have to open the administration panel every time they want to make a change.

"Ten years ago, we wanted to make it easier for businesses to sell online," said Nikolay Iliev, CloudCart's co-founder and chief executive. "Today, having a store is only part of the challenge. Merchants also need people, time and expertise to run it and help it grow." Iliev said the company has spent the past two years changing the way it works by using AI. It now wants to share what it has learned so store owners can spend less time on repeated, everyday tasks.

Larger merchants can also get help from a special Growth & AI Transformation team. This team helps them set up the technology and improve how they use it over time. The program accepts around 25 merchants at most in each country. It also allows only one customer from each business sector in each market. CloudCart's customers include businesses in electronics, sports retail and specialty coffee. Around 60 percent of its customers moved from another platform. Most came from Shopify, WooCommerce or systems they had built themselves.

1.6 Million Searches at One Retailer

CloudCart's AI tools are also helping people shop. During a three-month period in the summer and fall, its shopping assistant, Aura Chat, had more than 32,000 conversations with over 22,000 customers at a large Bulgarian electronics and home appliances retailer. CloudCart did not reveal the retailer's name. The assistant helps shoppers find products, check whether items are available and decide what to buy. Its average response time is 19.3 seconds.

Here are the main figures from that period:

• Aura Chat: More than 32,000 conversations and 4,327 orders recorded after chat interactions.
• Aura Search: More than 1.6 million searches and 5,290 orders recorded after search interactions.

There is one important detail: CloudCart counts orders that were placed after someone used an AI tool. The figures do not show whether the assistant actually caused those purchases.

27 AI Agents Used Inside the Company

CloudCart says it tested the technology inside its own business before offering it to customers. The founders, brothers Nikolay and Peter Iliev, first changed the company's work processes. They then introduced AI across seven areas: customer support, DevOps, monitoring, marketing, preventing customers from leaving, finding potential sales customers and financial analysis. The company now uses 27 AI agents across these seven areas. It has also replaced more than 15 external software tools with systems it built itself.

In customer support, AI solved 95 percent of the 2,989 support requests handled between June and the middle of October. A reply was sent to 98 percent of all requests within 60 minutes. Customer satisfaction received an average score of 4.8 out of 5. Human employees still deal with difficult cases.

The financial results have also improved. CloudCart's EBITDA margin increased by 43 percentage points. It went from minus 26 percent two years ago to plus 17 percent in the first quarter of this year. Its gross margin also increased, from 69 percent to 79 percent during the same period.

"Our team designs the agents, sets the rules and decides what they should improve," said Peter Iliev, the company's co-founder and chief technology officer. "That experience is what we bring to merchants: technology backed by people who understand how to put it to work in a real business."

No Card Processing Fees During the Holidays

Along with its new AI tools, CloudCart is offering merchants a special deal during one of the busiest shopping periods of the year. Businesses that use its payment service, CloudCart Pay, can avoid processing fees on eligible card payments until the end of the year. The service supports card payments, Apple Pay and Google Pay. CloudCart will cover these costs during Black Friday and the holiday shopping season. More than 100 merchants already use the service.

"Black Friday and the holidays are a key trading period for many of our merchants," Nikolay Iliev said. "We want to help them offer a simpler checkout and keep more of what they earn." Even outside this temporary offer, CloudCart does not charge merchants a percentage-based commission on their sales. New businesses can also start an online store for €1 during their first three months.

Shopify and Amazon Are Moving in the Same Direction

CloudCart is entering a market where major companies are also developing AI tools quickly. Shopify has continued to improve its own assistant, Sidekick. It allows merchants to ask questions about their store data and make changes to their stores using everyday language. Amazon has also introduced an improved AI agent called Seller Assistant, which can carry out certain tasks for sellers, as Modern Retail reported. At the same time, companies are competing to build AI assistants that help people shop. OpenAI has turned ChatGPT into a shopping channel that charges retailers a fee. Meta, Walmart and Shopify are also supporting the Personal Agent Protocol, a system designed for shopping assistants.

CloudCart's approach is different in one important way. Instead of building just one AI assistant of its own, it lets merchants connect whichever AI model they already use. MCP has quickly become a common standard for making these connections. For example, services such as Agentic Firmenbuch use it to let people search Austria's company register through Claude.

What Happens Next?

CloudCart plans to give Aura more abilities so it can perform additional tasks inside online stores, with the store owners' permission. These tasks could include search engine optimization (SEO), writing advertising and product text, managing paid advertisements and choosing how products are displayed.

The company is also about to launch a service called CloudCart Ecosystem of Experts. It will connect merchants with specialist partners. The platform will bring project discussions, offers, contracts and invoices together in one place. CloudCart will also act as a middleman when payment disagreements happen.

Nikolay and Peter Iliev founded CloudCart in 2016. Today, the company says it has helped more than 21,000 businesses start selling online. It has over 1,500 paying merchants in seven countries and supports 11 languages. Last year, merchants using the platform processed around 5.5 million orders and made more than €550 million in sales.