Agentic Commerce Copilot PayPal AI Hackathon Demo

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  RENDER DASH BOARD

Inspiration

AI agents can now browse, compare, and decide but they still can't pay. I built Agentic Commerce Copilot to close that last mile: an AI shopping agent that finds a product, recommends one, and actually completes checkout with PayPal.

What it does

You describe what you want in plain English. The agent:

1. Parses your request into structured search parameters using Groq's openai/gpt-oss-120b
2. Searches a 15-product catalog and returns matches
3. Recommends exactly one product with plain-text reasoning
4. Displays results as cards or a sortable AG Grid comparison table
5. Creates a real PayPal sandbox order when you click "Buy with PayPal"
6. Redirects you to approve, then captures the payment on return
7. Shows a receipt with payer info, order ID, capture ID, and a product recap

How I built it

• Frontend: Next.js 16 (App Router) + Tailwind CSS v4
• AI: Groq SDK with openai/gpt-oss-120b — used for request parsing and product recommendation
• Payments: PayPal Orders v2 REST API (sandbox) — auth, create order, capture order
• Data table: AG Grid Community — sortable/filterable product comparison
• Deploy: Render (Frankfurt, EU Central)

Challenges I ran into

• Groq retired llama-3.3-70b-versatile mid-hackathon. Switched to openai/gpt-oss-120b and stripped out function-calling in favor of JSON mode for reliability.
• PayPal capture must use the same order ID from the create step. Getting the redirect flow right took a few iterations.
• Next.js 16's Turbopack occasionally lost route registration during hot reload — deleting .next and restarting fixed it.

What I learned

• PayPal Orders v2 is remarkably clean. Auth → create → capture is three HTTP calls.
• JSON mode on a smaller model is more reliable than tool-calling for structured extraction.
• Server-side API keys are non-negotiable. The PayPal secret never touches the browser.

What's next

• Persist orders in a database instead of localStorage
• Real product data via Channel3 API
• Multi-item cart with a single PayPal order
• Save payment methods for one-click reorder

Built With

• groq
• nextjs
• npm
• tailwind