Ship a self‑serve commerce MCP without the sales call: the four anti‑patterns we removed

Description and use

Developers can instantly register and access merchant data via BuyWhere MCP without sales involvement, enjoying a transparent 1,000‑request‑per‑day free tier.

Problem

Enterprise merchants struggled with opaque, sales‑gated APIs that required manual onboarding, unclear tier limits, and undocumented endpoints, hindering rapid integration.

Outcome

Developers can register and access real merchant data in under a minute, with 386M products and 895K merchants across SG/MY/PH/AU, and a generous free tier of 1,000 requests/day.

Workflow

• 1. Send POST to https://api.buywhere.ai/v1/auth/register to receive an api_key.
• 2. Use the key in the 401 body or in the config to authenticate subsequent requests.
• 3. Call GET https://api.buywhere.ai/mcp to discover tools (search_catalog, lookup_merchant, normalize_product).
• 4. Integrate the MCP tools into your application or Claude Desktop via the provided JSON snippet.

Evidence

First 1,000 requests/day are free; above that, transparent per‑tier pricing — no opaque 401s.

Source

We register programmatically; the key is live in the response.

Source