PayPal Connect

Here’s a Markdown draft you can paste into About the project:

## Inspiration

Small businesses often juggle supplier research, price discussions, contractor deliverables, and payment approvals across disconnected tools. We wanted to explore how AI could reduce that coordination work without giving up human control over money.

## What it does

PayPal Connect is a prototype for AI-assisted small-business commerce. Gemini can negotiate a price within server-enforced limits and review an uploaded deliverable. PayPal Sandbox provides checkout and payout flows, with a person required to approve the payment action.

The app also includes a sample business dashboard, an AG Grid ledger, and illustrative procurement and project-planning screens. These demonstrate the broader workflow; they are not connected to live business accounts or external supplier and project-management services.

## How we built it

We built the interface with React and TypeScript, with an Express server handling AI and payment requests. Gemini calls run server-side through Google’s GenAI SDK. PayPal operations use Sandbox APIs, keeping credentials on the server. The browser requests an order, the buyer approves it through PayPal, and the server then requests capture.

## Challenges and what we learned

Payment approval and payment completion are different events. In our Sandbox test, OAuth, order creation, and buyer approval worked, but PayPal rejected capture with `COMPLIANCE_VIOLATION`. We therefore do not claim a successful end-to-end payment. We also learned to clearly distinguish real integrations from illustrative screens and to keep explicit human approval between AI recommendations and financial actions.

## What’s next

We plan to add more features and making sure they are well integrated.