By: Elowen Gray
In an era where milliseconds can significantly impact customer retention and revenue, seamless digital experiences have become more than a luxury; they are increasingly seen as a competitive necessity. Few professionals understand this better than Pavan Palleti, a certified Salesforce Technical Architect with expertise across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, CPQ, and Billing. Palleti recently led a comprehensive, end-to-end transformation for a global cloud-based commerce firm—designing a secure, event-driven architecture that now serves as a model for customer onboarding and automated billing within Salesforce ecosystems.
“The journey starts when a customer clicks ‘Buy Now’ on our public website and is redirected to our Salesforce Experience Cloud site as a guest user,” Palleti explains. “While the user experiences a smooth and intuitive flow, there is actually a multi-step process occurring behind the scenes.” First, a custom Lightning Web Component collects the user’s registration data, including name, contact, and address. Once submitted, an Account record is created via Apex. Immediately afterward, the system sends the address information to a third-party address verification service.
The architecture is intentionally decoupled to comply with Salesforce’s transaction sequencing constraints, which typically prevent HTTP callouts immediately after a DML operation due to the “Uncommitted Work Pending” error. To address this, Palleti strategically separated the flow using JavaScript promises in the LWC layer—invoking one Apex method to handle account creation, and then, upon success, calling a second Apex method to perform the HTTP callout for address verification. This separation helped ensure transactional consistency while maintaining system integrity, all while preserving a responsive user experience.
“Once the address verification was successful, the system needed to create both a Contact and a User—while still operating under guest user permissions and without exposing sensitive account data,” Palleti continues. To address this, he implemented a temporary access mechanism, granting just enough visibility for the guest to complete registration. Afterward, that access was revoked securely.
Given that guest users lack permission to perform updates or deletions on standard objects, Palleti employed Platform Events to execute those sensitive operations asynchronously. He published events containing necessary metadata, which then triggered privileged Apex processes to update or revoke access in the background. In cases where verification failed, a separate event was published to delete the account entirely, ensuring that users could retry registration without encountering duplicate record errors. This pattern enabled a clean separation between low-privilege guest operations and high-privilege data actions—while aiming to maintain auditability, security, and system scalability.
With the user successfully registered and authenticated, Palleti moved the solution into its next critical phase: automated subscription billing. Credit card details were securely captured through a custom-built Lightning Web Component, providing a streamlined and compliant user experience. Rather than building a custom integration from scratch, Palleti leveraged prebuilt methods provided by the CyberSource package, invoking those APIs from Apex to securely tokenize payment data and create Payment Method records within Salesforce.
Leveraging Salesforce CPQ and Billing, the system then autonomously generated Invoices and applied preconfigured revenue recognition rules, invoice schedules, and payment schedules. The entire billing workflow was engineered to function with minimal manual intervention, ensuring a scalable and compliant subscription infrastructure. This demonstrated Palleti’s ability to integrate platform capabilities with practical business needs, resulting in a resilient, real-time revenue engine.
Pavan Palleti’s implementation is more than a technical success—it represents a strategic milestone that combines secure architecture, system limits awareness, and enterprise-grade automation. His ability to engineer intelligent, modular, and policy-compliant flows across the full lifecycle—from guest onboarding to billing automation—reflects a balanced combination of architectural insight and hands-on precision. In doing so, he has not only addressed a complex integration challenge but has also set a high bar for what a Salesforce-powered customer experience could look like in the modern cloud era.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any organization, including Salesforce or CyberSource. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not intended as professional advice. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research and consult with experts before implementing any of the solutions discussed in this article.
