Project status
Concept and implementation plan recorded on October 28, 2026. Development has not started. This draft describes intended functionality, not completed capabilities or measured results. The technology tags identify the planned stack and will be updated to reflect the finished implementation.
Inspiration
When an online retailer discovers a stockout after customers have paid, the merchant must coordinate alternatives, scarce inventory, customer preferences, and refunds. Handling each order independently can offer the only suitable replacement to a flexible customer while leaving another customer without an acceptable option.
What we plan to build
RescueDesk is an AI-assisted stockout recovery workspace for small PayPal merchants. It will extract customer requirements from order notes, propose evidence-backed alternatives from the merchant's own catalog, and allocate limited replacement inventory across affected orders. The merchant will review the proposed offers before customers receive a choice.
Each customer will see the original item, proposed replacement, relevant differences, and any refund amount. Customers can explicitly accept the replacement or choose cancellation. PayPal Sandbox will process the corresponding partial or full refund against the original captured payment.
Distinctive approach
The intended contribution is a coordinated recovery workflow: customer-specific constraints, allocation across multiple orders, inventory reservations, explicit consent, and reconciled payment outcomes. Existing substitution and order-management products inform the competitive landscape; we do not claim to have invented the category.
AI will interpret requirements and explain alternatives. Application code will enforce stock limits, calculate money amounts, validate approvals, and prevent duplicate refunds. Uncertain recommendations will require review.
Planned demonstration
Three fictional customers have each paid $100. One requires the only suitable black replacement, priced at $90. A flexible customer accepts a blue replacement priced at $95. A third customer chooses cancellation. The intended demonstration will show $10, $5, and $100 refunds through PayPal Sandbox, with $185 retained before fees. These figures are a planned synthetic scenario, not actual business results.
Planned implementation
React and TypeScript frontend; Node.js/Express backend; PostgreSQL persistence; Gemini structured outputs; PayPal Orders v2, Payments v2, and verified webhooks; an AG Studio merchant dashboard subject to an appropriate trial license; Render hosting.
The initial scope is one merchant, USD, single-item unfulfilled orders, and equal-price or cheaper replacements. Planned verification covers customer consent, concurrent inventory reservations, stale offers, duplicate actions, refund failures, webhook verification, and restart recovery.
Next steps
Validate the workflow with merchants, prove the PayPal capture/refund integration, implement and test the prototype, then add the public source repository, working demonstration, measured evaluation results, and demo video before final submission.
Built With
- ag-studio
- express.js
- gemini
- node.js
- paypal
- postgresql
- react
- render
- typescript