Is Your Store Ready for the Personal Bots?
The Wild Weekend That Changed Everything: Moltbook, OpenClaw, and the Dawn of Agentic Commerce
G’day Rankers, welcome back.
It’s been an amazing weekend, and I need to tell you about something that’s taking the AI world by storm: Moltbook. If you haven’t heard of it yet, buckle up—this is the kind of development that signals a major shift in how we’ll interact with technology in 2026 and beyond.
What Is Moltbook?
Moltbook is, on the surface, a social media network purely for AI agents. Think Reddit, but instead of humans posting and commenting, it’s AI agents interacting with each other. And the growth has been explosive—on Saturday alone, 10,000 agents registered. By the time I’m writing this, there are over 1.5 million agents on the platform. These aren’t people. These are actual bots.
The platform emerged from something called Clawdbot, which evolved into Moltbook Bot, and is now known as OpenClaw. It’s an experimental platform where you can set up an AI agent on your machine and give it essentially free reign to operate that computer.
My Experience: The Power and the Peril
I installed OpenClaw on an old laptop on Friday, and within half an hour, I was texting my bot asking about my calendar for next week. I could tell it to build a website. I could ask it to clean up my desktop. This is what I’ve been calling a universal assistant—and I wrote about this concept in my book, Beyond Google: Mastering Search In A World Of AI Assistants.
But here’s where things get concerning.
This tool is inherently dangerous. It’s easily manipulated. Within minutes of setting up my bot through iMessage (which I thought was the most secure way), it started responding to every message that came into iMessage—which was inappropriate, to say the least. It also changed my default search engine to some paid search engine without my explicit permission.
I would strongly advise anyone who is not familiar with security to steer clear of this tool.
The ecosystem is a bit like the Wild West right now. You can download various tools and skills that other people have built for OpenClaw, but they’re inherently dangerous because you don’t know what’s in them. People are getting their API keys exposed, private details leaked—one developer was even doxxed by his own agent on Moltbook.
There’s even something called Moltroad now (echoing the infamous Silk Road), where agents can buy and sell illegal items like stolen identities, compromised API keys, and worse. We’re entering truly wild times.
What This Means: The Explosion of Agentic Commerce
Despite the chaos, what this tells me is crystal clear: agentic commerce is going to explode in 2026.
We’re already seeing clients experience up to 1,000% increases in AI-driven sales compared to last year. And this doesn’t even include Google yet—we’re just looking at ChatGPT. Most people will be using agentic shopping without giving it a second thought, because they’ll be doing it through Google Search.
The OpenAI Checkout Conundrum
OpenAI has announced that their checkout feature will be available in ChatGPT, but they’re going to charge 4% on every transaction. If you’re on Shopify, with their fees added in, you’re looking at roughly 9% just for transaction costs. That starts to get expensive fast.
Here’s what keeps me up at night: we have clients currently doing good revenue through ChatGPT—one client is doing 1% of their total revenue through the platform. But to use OpenAI’s checkout, you have to opt in.
The big questions:
- If a merchant doesn’t opt in, will their sales drop off?
- OpenAI is also rolling out ads in ChatGPT—if merchants don’t run ads, will they be demoted in results?
- If a client opts in for merchant checkout, will all their existing sales suddenly incur that 4% fee?
These are the same questions we grappled with 20-25 years ago when Google Ads first launched. Now we’re facing them again with OpenAI. The difference is, we already know how this story goes with Google, but ChatGPT ads are new territory.
We don’t have all the answers yet. All we can do is test and learn. So that’s exactly what we’re doing—I’ll be running ChatGPT ads for one or two clients to see what happens.
Getting Ready: New Tools for WooCommerce and Shopify
The good news is that we’ve been preparing for this. We’ve developed new tools for both WooCommerce and Shopify to help get sites ready for agentic commerce. These tools will analyse your Universal Commerce Protocol setup (even though it’s not fully rolled out yet—we’re getting you ready in advance).
We’re currently testing these tools with clients, and I’m blown away by how effective they are. The reason we built them is simple: we wanted to do a better job for our clients and make implementation happen faster.
Looking for Beta Testers
If you have a WooCommerce site and want to be part of shaping the future of agentic commerce, I’m looking for beta testers for our new tool called SKAW. I don’t have many WooCommerce clients at the moment, so I’m really looking for feedback from the community.
The Bottom Line
The universal assistant I predicted in my book isn’t coming—it’s here. Maybe not in its final, polished form, but the foundation is being laid right now. People are seeing the value and starting to build their own universal assistants.
This is different from using Claude in Chrome or similar browser-based tools. OpenClaw runs on a dedicated machine, giving it far more capability—and far more risk.
The reason these universal assistants will succeed is simple: they make our lives easier. That’s always been the driving force behind technological adoption, and it’s no different here.
Stay tuned for more updates. If you have questions about any of this, please reach out. And if you want to be a beta tester for SKAW, especially if you have a WooCommerce site, I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at [email protected]
Remember to like, share, and subscribe wherever you see this content—LinkedIn, X, Facebook, YouTube—it all helps spread the word about what’s coming.
Hopefully this has been helpful. See you next week!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
