Developer Portal & AI-powered Authorization Rate tooling
Rebuilding the developer experience and shipping AI for merchants.
PayPal's developer audience spans solo integrators to enterprise platforms. The legacy portal optimised for documentation breadth, not first-integration success.
New developers churned before their first successful API call, and merchants had no visibility into why authorizations failed across regions.
- 01
Mapped the developer journey from landing page to first webhook, identifying 7 drop-off points.
- 02
Designed a guided onboarding flow with contextual code samples, sandbox keys and inline checks.
- 03
Partnered with applied ML to design an Auth Rate tool that explains declines and proposes fixes in plain language.
- 04
Localised the conversational layer for 6 languages with culturally aware tone tokens.
Where developers drop off
Diary studies and analytics review pinpointed 7 drop-off moments in the first 24 hours. Onboarding was redesigned to remove three of them entirely and to coach through the rest.
Guided, opinionated onboarding
A new portal pairs documentation with stateful tutorials — sandbox credentials, live request previews and inline validation move every developer to a successful call in under 10 minutes.
- Monthly developers: 45k → 135k in 4 months
- Time-to-first-call reduced 60%
Explaining declines in plain language
A conversational tool surfaces the top reasons a merchant's authorization rate dropped, ranks suggested fixes by impact and offers one-click experiment plans. Quarterly tool usage grew 30%.
What shipped, and what changed.
Monthly active developers nearly tripled in the first 4 months.
Quarterly tool usage up 30% with sustained growth across regions.
Estimated $1M merchant revenue lift attributed to Auth Rate guidance.
Localised conversational AI shipped in 6 languages.