If you have already tried to connect a marketplace to Claude, the WooCommerce version will feel wrong in a good way. There is no developer programme to join, no app to submit, no review to wait through. The reason is structural: WooCommerce runs on your own WordPress install, so there is no platform standing between you and the API.
What you actually do
In your WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → REST API and create a key for a store user with the capabilities the work needs. You get a Consumer Key and a Consumer Secret. With the store URL, that is the whole credential set.
Compare that to the neighbours. Etsy needs an app approved for Seller API Access. eBay needs a Developers Program app and a production keyset. Amazon needs a Professional Selling plan, an approved developer profile and a private SP-API app. WooCommerce needs a dropdown and a button.
The two things that still go wrong
The store URL. Enter the HTTPS root of the store. If WordPress lives in a subdirectory below the domain, keep that subdirectory. Do not append /wp-json/wc/v3 — that is the API path, and the client adds it. Pasting the full API path is the most common cause of a connection that looks configured and returns nothing useful.
The secret is shown once. The Consumer Secret is generated together with the key and displayed a single time. There is no “show again”. If you close the page before copying it, the fix is to revoke the key and issue a new one, which is quick but surprising the first time.
Read is not Read/Write
When you create the key, the permission dropdown decides everything the connection will ever be able to do. Read lets an assistant answer questions about products, orders and customers. Read/Write is what lets it change a price, adjust stock, update an order or issue a refund.
This is the same read-versus-write split that separates the hosted marketplace connectors from the ones that actually act, except here you control which side you are on, and the choice is a dropdown rather than a scope review. Choose deliberately: a Read key is a reasonable place to start if you only want reporting, and issuing a second key later costs nothing.
The Orkas connector covers products, taxonomy, inventory, orders, customers, coupons, reviews, refunds and reports. Credentials are encrypted on your own device rather than living in a config file or on someone else's servers, and anything that writes to a live store goes through a permission prompt in the client rather than relying on the model to be careful.
When something else is the better answer
You want it running on a schedule with nobody watching: this is a desktop application, so closing the window stops it. A WordPress cron job or a scheduled task on your own server is the right shape for unattended work.
You want the assistant working on the site rather than the shop: WooCommerce data is products and orders. Editing posts, templates or plugins is WordPress, which is a different surface with its own tooling.
You want to bulk-edit product data: WooCommerce already ships CSV import and export, and for a straight column-by-column update that is faster than any conversation.
The same catalogue covers Etsy, eBay, Walmart Marketplace, Amazon Seller Central, Shopify and the Chinese platforms, so if you run a WooCommerce store alongside a marketplace, the credentials live in one place instead of one service per storefront.