PayPal

What it is

An agent connected to PayPal works in your PayPal business account the way someone on your support or finance team does. It finds a customer’s payment and explains it, refunds a payment, prepares an answer when a customer opens a dispute, sends and follows up on invoices, and looks after subscriptions. Every refund, every message to a customer and every change goes through approval first, and the agent can never send money to anyone.

Before you start

You need a PayPal business account, and about five minutes. The connection uses an app you create in your own PayPal account, in the PayPal Developer Dashboard; you then paste its Client ID and Secret into AgentTeams. There’s nothing to install.

1. Sign in at developer.paypal.com with your PayPal business account, and switch the dashboard to Live at the top.
2. Open Apps & Credentials, click Create App, name it after the agent (for example “Sofia AgentTeams”) and choose Merchant.
3. Open the app and, under Features, tick Transaction search, Invoicing and Customer disputes, plus Subscriptions if you sell them, and save. Accepting payments is on already. The names can differ slightly in your dashboard.
4. Keep the page open: the agent’s setup asks for the app’s Client ID and its Secret.

Transaction search is the one that finds payments, and it’s off on a new app. A feature you switch on later can take a few hours before the agent can use it. Leave Payouts off: the agent never sends money.

An app of its own for each agent is the cleanest: you can delete it later without touching anything else. To try things out without real money, switch the dashboard to Sandbox instead and create the app there.

Connecting PayPal

1. Open the agent, go to the Tools tab and choose PayPal.
2. Paste the app’s Client ID and Secret. Choose Sandbox (test) only for an app you made in the sandbox.
3. The wizard checks the connection, shows which of the app’s features are on, and switches on the default reaction. You’re done.

What the agent can do

• Payments. Find a payment by the customer’s email, an invoice or order number, or its transaction id, and explain its status, the fees and what’s been refunded. It also reads orders, the balance and the history of a subscription’s payments.
• Refunds. Refund a payment, fully or in part, with a short note to the customer. PayPal allows a refund for up to 180 days after the payment.
• Disputes and claims. Read a new dispute with the customer’s messages and the deadline, look up the payment and the order behind it, and prepare an answer: a message to the customer, an offer, proof of shipping or of a refund, or accepting the claim.
• Invoices. Find and read invoices, draft new ones, send them, remind customers who haven’t paid, cancel an invoice, and record a payment that came in another way, like a bank transfer.
• Subscriptions. Look up a subscription and why a payment failed, and pause, resume or cancel it.

What it never does: send money to anyone (payouts), see card numbers, or change your PayPal account’s settings.

What the app allows

The agent can do what the app’s features allow, in your account only. We use them for the work above:

• Transaction search, read only, to find payments, refunds and fees and read the balance.
• Accepting payments, to read payments, orders and refunds, and to refund.
• Customer disputes, to read disputes and answer them.
• Invoicing, to find, draft, send and follow up on invoices.
• Subscriptions, to read subscriptions and their payments, and pause, resume or cancel them.
• Notifications, so the agent hears about disputes, payments, refunds, invoices and subscriptions that go through the app, as they happen. Setting them up is done for you when you connect.

What it reacts to

One reaction is on from the start: a new dispute. The agent reads it, looks up the payment and the order, and brings your team a short summary with what the customer says, what your records show, the deadline and what it suggests. It does nothing about the dispute until a person approves exactly that.

On the Tasks page you can also switch on reactions to payments received, refunds, reversals (a chargeback, for example), denied payments, dispute updates and closed disputes, paid and cancelled invoices, and cancelled subscriptions and failed subscription payments. Say in a reaction’s instruction which ones matter: a payment reaction fires for every payment PayPal tells the agent about. The agent never reacts to a change it made itself, like its own refund. See Reactions for filters and custom instructions.

What PayPal tells the agent about

PayPal tells an app only about what happens through that app. The app you created for the agent hears about what the agent does through it, like the invoices it sends and the refunds it makes, and what follows from that, like one of those invoices being paid. It doesn’t hear about payments your shop takes through its own PayPal connection, like a shop plugin, PayPal buttons or another app: reactions to those payments, their refunds and reversals never start. PayPal doesn’t say whether disputes about those payments reach a second app either, so don’t rely on the dispute reaction alone.

The agent still finds every payment in your account when it looks, and the disputes PayPal lists for it. To be sure no dispute waits unseen, give the agent a scheduled task, for example to check for new disputes every morning and brief your team.

A customer’s messages in a dispute are their words: the agent treats them as information, never as instructions.

Staying in control

Every refund, every message or offer to a customer, every piece of evidence for PayPal and every change to an invoice or a subscription goes through a review step first, and your company’s rules decide which need a person to approve them. Refunds and anything that reaches a customer are always reviewed. Approval gates explains how.

What we receive, and what we keep

• PayPal tells us about disputes, payments, refunds, invoices and subscriptions that go through the app you connected. We only look into and keep the ones an agent has a reaction for; the rest are dropped straight away.
• The app’s Secret is stored encrypted and used only for the agent’s work in PayPal.
• What the agent reads and writes while working stays with that agent in your own AgentTeams workspace, the same way its chats and emails do.
• Nothing from your PayPal account is used to train any model. For the full picture, see our privacy policy.

Disconnecting

There are two places, and doing both is the clean way round:

1. In AgentTeams. Open the agent, go to the Tools tab, open the PayPal card and click Disconnect. The agent stops working in PayPal at once, and PayPal stops telling us about your account.
2. In PayPal. Open the app in the PayPal Developer Dashboard and delete it. The app is yours, so this is the step that ends its access at PayPal.

Disconnecting leaves everything the agent already did in PayPal in place, and the agent keeps what it learned. Remove the agent entirely if you want that gone too.

If something is off

• PayPal doesn’t accept the Client ID and Secret. Copy both again from the same app, and check the dashboard’s Live or Sandbox switch matches what you chose in AgentTeams.
• It can’t find payments. Transaction search is off in the app: switch it on under Features. It can take a few hours to work.
• It doesn’t find a payment from the last few hours. PayPal adds payments to the search up to three hours late. With the payment’s transaction id, the agent finds it straight away.
• It can’t see an order from your online shop. A shop that takes PayPal through its own plugin may keep its orders to itself. The agent finds the payment instead, by the customer or the transaction id.
• A refund is refused. PayPal allows refunds for 180 days after a payment, and never more than what’s left of it.

Related

• AI agents for PayPal: what teams use it for
• Reactions: filters and custom instructions
• Approval gates: who approves what