CloudCart Lets Merchants Run Their Online Stores Through Claude and ChatGPT

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Forget the admin panel, just ask the chatbot! The Bulgarian e-commerce platform CloudCart now lets merchants connect A.I. assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini directly to their online stores. Through a new MCP server, those assistants can create products, pull stock reports and carry out other store management tasks, within the permissions the merchant grants. The Sofia-based company is marking its 10th anniversary with the launch, along with a holiday offer that waives card processing fees until the end of the year.

Store Management by Prompt

The new connection runs through CloudCart’s developer platform, cloudcart.dev. Merchants and their technical partners can link A.I. assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and the coding tool Cursor to their store via an MCP server and command-line tools. Besides routine tasks, the setup supports custom design, new functionality and integrations with third-party software, without the merchant having to open the administration interface for every single action.

“Ten years ago, we wanted to make it easier for businesses to sell online,” said Nikolay Iliev, co-founder and chief executive of CloudCart. “Today, having a store is only part of the challenge. Merchants also need people, time and expertise to run it and help it grow.” According to Nikolay Iliev, the company has spent the past two years rebuilding its own work around A.I. and now wants to pass that experience on so merchants can spend less time on repetitive tasks.

For larger merchants, CloudCart adds a dedicated Growth & A.I. Transformation team that handles implementation and ongoing optimization. The program is capped at roughly 25 merchants per country, with only one client per vertical in each market. CloudCart’s customers come from sectors such as electronics, sports retail and specialty coffee. About 60 percent of them switched from another platform, mainly Shopify, WooCommerce or custom-built solutions.

1.6 Million Searches at One Retailer

CloudCart’s A.I. is already serving shoppers, too. Over a three-month period this summer and fall, its shopping assistant Aura Chat held more than 32,000 conversations with over 22,000 customers at a major Bulgarian electronics and home appliances retailer, which the company did not name. The assistant helps shoppers find products, check availability and make purchasing decisions, with an average response time of 19.3 seconds.

The key figures from that period:

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

It is worth noting that CloudCart counts orders placed following an A.I. interaction. Whether the assistant actually triggered those purchases is not clear from the figures.

27 A.I. Agents in Its Own Operations

CloudCart says it tested the technology on itself first. The founders, brothers Nikolay and Peter Iliev, redesigned the company’s workflows before rolling out A.I. across merchant support, DevOps, monitoring, marketing, churn prevention, sales prospecting and financial analysis. The company now runs 27 A.I. agents across these seven functions and has replaced more than 15 external software tools with systems built in-house.

In support, A.I. resolved 95 percent of the 2,989 tickets processed between June and mid-October. Ninety-eight percent of all tickets received an answer within 60 minutes, and customer satisfaction averaged 4.8 out of 5. A human team still handles complex cases.

The financial effect is significant: CloudCart’s EBITDA margin improved by 43 percentage points, from minus 26 percent two years ago to plus 17 percent in the first quarter of this year. Gross margin rose from 69 to 79 percent over the same period.

“Our team designs the agents, sets the rules and decides what they should improve,” said Peter Iliev, 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 Fees Through the Holidays

Alongside the A.I. push, CloudCart is courting merchants with a pricing offer for the busiest season of the year. Merchants who use its payment service CloudCart Pay, which bundles card payments, Apple Pay and Google Pay, will pay no processing fees on eligible card payments until the end of the year. CloudCart covers those costs through Black Friday and the holiday 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.” Regardless of the temporary offer, CloudCart charges no percentage-based commission on merchant sales. New businesses can launch a store for €1 for the first three months.

Shopify and Amazon Are Pushing in the Same Direction

CloudCart is entering a field where the giants are moving fast. Shopify has steadily expanded its in-house assistant Sidekick, which lets merchants query analytics and change their stores in natural language, and Amazon has introduced an upgraded agent called Seller Assistant that can take certain actions on a seller’s behalf, as Modern Retail reported. At the same time, the battle over A.I. agents on the shopper side is heating up: OpenAI has turned ChatGPT into a shopping channel that charges retailers a fee, and Meta, Walmart and Shopify are backing the Personal Agent Protocol for shopping agents.

CloudCart’s bet differs in one respect: instead of building a single in-house assistant, it opens the store to whichever A.I. model a merchant already uses. MCP has quickly become the standard for this kind of connection, with services such as Agentic Firmenbuch using it to make Austria’s company register searchable via Claude.

What Comes Next

CloudCart plans to expand Aura so it can take on more tasks inside merchants’ stores with their approval, from SEO and copywriting to paid advertising and merchandising. A portal called CloudCart Ecosystem of Experts is also about to launch. It is meant to connect merchants with expert partners and bring project communication, proposals, contracts and invoices into one place, with CloudCart acting as an intermediary in payment disputes.

The company was founded in 2016 by Nikolay and Peter Iliev. Today, CloudCart says it has helped more than 21,000 businesses get online and counts over 1,500 paying merchants in seven countries and 11 languages. Last year, merchants on the platform processed about 5.5 million orders and more than €550 million in sales.