ProofPay – AI Dispute Defender

Protecting sellers, one dispute at a time.

💡 Inspiration

Small businesses and individual sellers often face difficulties when customers raise payment disputes. They must understand the complaint, collect transaction records, find delivery proof, and prepare responses within limited time.

For small sellers without dedicated support teams, this process can be confusing and stressful.

We were inspired to build ProofPay, an AI-powered dispute management assistant that helps sellers understand customer complaints, identify missing evidence, and prepare appropriate dispute responses.

Our goal is not simply to help sellers fight disputes, but to help them make better, evidence-based decisions.

🚀 What is ProofPay?

ProofPay connects PayPal payment processing with AI-powered dispute analysis in one platform.

It supports sellers throughout the payment and dispute management journey.

1. Smart PayPal Payment Creation

Sellers create bills by entering customer names, item details, and payment amounts.
The application generates PayPal checkout links and QR codes.
Customers can complete payments through the PayPal Sandbox checkout.
Payment capture is handled through the PayPal Orders API.
Bill statuses are updated from PENDING to PAID after successful payment capture.

2. PayPal Dispute Management

When a customer reports a transaction problem and a corresponding dispute is available, ProofPay retrieves dispute information through the PayPal Disputes API.

It connects the dispute with the original payment and helps sellers manage the complaint from one dashboard.

3. AI Evidence Gap Detector

This is the core feature of ProofPay.

The seller provides delivery-related information, including:

Courier name
Tracking number
Delivery notes
Available supporting evidence

Using Google Gemini, ProofPay analyses the available information and identifies evidence gaps.

It provides two important recommendations:

NEED MORE PROOF: When the available information is insufficient, the AI explains what is missing, such as tracking details, delivery confirmation, or supporting documents.

FIGHT: When the available evidence supports the seller's position, the AI can recommend contesting the dispute.

ACCEPT When the information is acceptable.

This prevents blind recommendations and encourages evidence-based dispute handling.

4. AI-Assisted Buyer Communication

ProofPay helps prepare buyer responses in English and Tamil. Sellers can review and manually edit the generated responses before proceeding.

5. Seller-Controlled Evidence Submission

ProofPay follows a human-in-the-loop approach.

The AI provides recommendations, but the seller makes the final decision. The seller can review and edit the dispute information before approving its submission through the PayPal Disputes API.

Nothing is submitted automatically without seller approval.

🛠️ How We Built It

We developed ProofPay as a web-based application by combining the PayPal Developer Sandbox with Google Gemini.

Our implementation includes:

PayPal Orders API for creating and capturing payment orders.
PayPal Disputes API for retrieving disputes and submitting supporting evidence.
Google Gemini for evidence analysis, recommendations, and buyer response generation.
A backend application to manage payment workflows, dispute information, and AI integration.
A web interface for bill creation, payment tracking, dispute management, and seller approval.

We focused on creating a practical workflow that connects the original payment with the subsequent dispute management process.

📚 Challenges We Faced

During development, we faced several challenges:

Integrating PayPal payment creation and capture into our application.
Managing separate seller and customer Sandbox payment workflows.
Connecting payment records with their corresponding disputes.
Designing AI analysis that identifies missing evidence instead of blindly supporting sellers.
Ensuring sellers retain control over AI-generated responses and evidence submission.
Making the overall payment and dispute workflow understandable and easy to use.

Working through these challenges helped us understand how payment APIs, AI-powered decision support, and real-world financial workflows can work together.

🌟 What Makes ProofPay Different?

Traditional payment dashboards primarily focus on transactions and payment status.

ProofPay goes a step further by focusing on what happens when a payment dispute occurs.

Its key innovation is the AI Evidence Gap Detector, which helps sellers understand whether their available evidence is sufficient to contest a dispute or whether additional proof is needed.

By combining PayPal integration, evidence-based AI recommendations, bilingual communication, and seller-controlled submission, ProofPay aims to make dispute management more transparent and accessible for small businesses.