Automated sales with manual review

An international software vendor runs its online sales pipeline as an automated, self-serve flow on top of a sales portal. From the initial quote through payment, software delivery and the customer notification, most orders go from cart to delivered software in under a minute with no human touch — this is straight-through processing for self-serve software sales. The small minority of orders that need a human judgement — a discount to approve, an incomplete payment to clear, a VAT location to verify — pause the automation at exactly the right step and surface as Tickiti interventions in the sales review queue. A reviewer makes one structured decision; the order picks up where it left off and finishes automatically. This is how the vendor combines straight-through automation with human-in-the-loop sales review on the same e-commerce platform.

The shape of the sales pipeline

The portal handles every order along the same automated path:

1. Quote and checkout. The customer chooses what they want, enters their details, and confirms the order.
2. Payment via PayPal. The portal hands the payment to the provider and waits for the confirmation.
3. Automated post-sale checks. The portal validates VAT treatment (B2C, EU B2B, non-EU) and runs any other automated rules the vendor has configured.
4. Software issued. The order’s deliverable is produced and attached to the order record.
5. Customer notified. The customer receives the confirmation email with the software and the invoice link.

Most orders go through all five steps unattended. Where the automation can’t make a confident call on its own, the order is parked in a pending state and a Tickiti intervention is raised in the sales review queue.

Why the pipeline pauses

Automation is excellent at the predictable cases. Some orders fail the predictable shape: a payment that hasn’t fully cleared, a customer whose country can’t be pinned down from the available data, a B2B VAT number that EU validation didn’t accept automatically, or a customer asking for a discount that needs sign-off. These are decisions that need a person, not a guess. The portal already detects them in code; what Tickiti interventions add is the structured way of asking a human for the answer, and the automatic return of that answer to the pipeline.

The portal already knows when it isn’t sure. Tickiti interventions are how it asks for one human decision, get the structured answer back, and resume.

Four interventions in the sales flow

Four interventions cover the conditions that the portal can’t auto-resolve. Each pauses the order at the appropriate stage, raises a ticket in the sales review queue with a structured panel of the relevant data, and resumes automation on acceptance.

1. Discount request

A customer asks for a quote with a discount — for a multi-licence order, a returning customer, an academic or non-profit case. The portal pauses before payment, captures the requested quantities and the proposed price on the structured panel, and raises a discount-request intervention. The reviewer either approves the discounted quote (which is sent back to the customer to pay against) or adjusts and approves it. The conversation, the proposed figures and the final approved price all stay on one ticket.

2. Incomplete PayPal payment

PayPal returns a pending or unsettled state instead of a clean confirmation — a held payment, a review case on the provider’s side, an asynchronous transfer that hasn’t landed yet. The order is parked with a pending payment flag, and the intervention panel surfaces the payment provider’s reference, the amount, the customer and the current status. The reviewer decides whether to release the order on the strength of the payment record or to keep it parked. On acceptance, the order resumes its automated completion.

3. VAT location check

The portal needs the customer’s country to apply the right VAT treatment. Where the automated signals don’t agree — the billing address says one country, the payment provider’s data says another — the order is parked with a pending VAT location check flag. The intervention panel shows the conflicting signals side by side; the reviewer confirms the country, and on acceptance the portal applies the correct VAT, completes the order and notifies the customer. This is straightforward EU VAT compliance, embedded in a ticket-based approval workflow.

4. B2B VAT validation

A business customer supplies a VAT number for zero-rated B2B treatment, but the EU VIES validation service didn’t confirm it automatically (a timeout, a hyphen in the wrong place, a number too new to be live). The intervention panel shows the supplied number and the raw VIES response. The reviewer confirms whether to treat the order as B2B or as B2C, and the order completes with the right tax treatment.

How an intervention resumes the pipeline

The mechanism is the same in every case, and management can describe it the same way every time:

1. The portal detects a checkpoint condition during the automated flow and parks the order in a pending state.
2. It raises a Tickiti intervention with the relevant data already laid out as a structured panel. A ticket appears in the sales review queue.
3. A reviewer opens the ticket, looks at the panel and any attached evidence, and accepts (with adjustments if appropriate).
4. Tickiti returns the structured decision to the portal automatically. No re-keying.
5. The portal clears the pending flag and the order finishes its automated completion — software issued, customer notified, invoice posted on the same ticket.

The interventions at a glance

What the vendor gets from running it this way

Routing the manual cases through Tickiti interventions, rather than through email or a side spreadsheet, turns sales operations into a measurable, defensible process:

1. Self-serve by default, human-reviewed by exception. Most orders never touch a person; reviewers only see the cases the rules can’t close on their own.
2. One audit trail per order. The structured panel, any conversation with the customer, the reviewer’s decision and the final confirmation all live on the same ticket — a clean compliance audit trail for finance and tax reviews.
3. One queue, no email triage. Reviewers work the sales review queue: prioritised, assignable, escalatable. Nothing depends on a particular person being awake.
4. Policy applied consistently. The same structured panel and accept-or-return controls fire for every discount request, every pending payment, every VAT case — so two reviewers handle the same situation the same way.
5. No re-keying between systems. Acceptance flows back to the sales portal automatically, so the order record and the decision never drift apart.
6. Visibility on the exceptions. Reporting on the queue shows how many discount requests are in flight, how long incomplete-payment cases sit, and which kinds of order most often need a human — useful input for tightening the next round of automated rules.

Where to go next

1. Multi-party approvals — the same intervention pattern applied to a different domain.
2. Interventions guide — how interventions work end to end.
3. Interventions quick start — stand up your first intervention.
4. Interventions technical reference — the full field and callback contract.