Case study
PayPal: Becoming the Default at Checkout
We needed to feature PayPal as the option the consumer wanted to use, and convert the transaction for the merchant.
This work is proprietary to PayPal. Flows are shown generically and in person only, so they are not reproduced here.
The stage
PayPal partners with the top 100 merchants. The job was the checkout in front of them.
What was unclear
PayPal showed up differently at every checkout.
Each merchant integration carried its own patterns. Across vaulting, express, and standard flows, the experience changed from one surface to the next: app switch versus web, first time versus returning. That inconsistency worked against PayPal's top priority, greater checkout prominence to grow TPV.
What I clarified
One proposal per merchant, on a weekly sprint.
On the Merchant Enablement team I produced a proposal package for each merchant. Each one mapped the current checkout against a clearer target state across the four entry contexts, Wallet, Express, Standard first time, and Standard return, and the major variants: app switch versus web, Pay Later versus Pay in Full, passkey, and vaulting.
Every package was the same stack: a screen audit, the complete checkout flows, a working prototype, a prototype video, and the decks for the merchant conversation.
Who I influenced
The package was what the team took into the room.
PMs and design leads used it in merchant conversations. I worked from PM briefs, with Principal Designer review and peer review inside a senior team. The proposals fed the merchant pitch for brands including Home Depot, Nintendo, Target, Best Buy, TikTok Shop, Chewy, and Microsoft.
The consumer side
The checkout dead end
A customer reaches checkout and finds there is no card that can pay. The card expired, or it was declined, or it was removed, or it was never added in the first place. The order stops there.
I built the Figma board that mapped that dead end back to every earlier moment the customer could have fixed the card. The board traced the touchpoints across roughly a month before checkout, marked which ones send a message today and which ones send nothing, and ended on the checkout experience itself.
The structure came together fast because I used Claude Code to turn a Design Director's diagram into the underlying framework of the board, then designed into it. The screens came from teams across the company, which meant tracking down owners in parts of the organization I had not worked with before. The work was presented to senior leadership, and the board became the template the team now uses to map the next flows.
PayPal, 2026. Figma, Claude Code, cross-team research.
What changed
Twenty-plus packages in my first six months, and the tooling to hold the pace.
The work ties back to the TPV priority: make PayPal more prominent and more consistent at the point of payment.
Holding a weekly cadence at that volume is its own design problem. The tooling was not part of my assignment, and I built it because the handoff into each package was the part that kept breaking. That story is its own case study: Merchant Flow Builder.
- 20+Proposal packages shipped
- 15 minPer merchant, from most of a day