A ticketing system looks simple, but the moment a popular event opens, many people chase the same seats at once. Miss these five early and problems surface on launch day.
1. Inventory integrity: how do you prevent double-selling?
The core is reserving seats and quantities atomically. You must lock inventory at reservation time and release it automatically on payment failure or timeout.
2. Can it survive burst traffic?
A ticket on-sale draws hundreds of times normal traffic within seconds. Design for the spike with queues, caching, and edge distribution.
3. How do you handle payments and refunds safely?
With payments, state mismatch against the external gateway is the biggest risk. Use idempotent, webhook-based processing to avoid the “paid but no ticket” case.
4. Does check-in work offline on-site?
Venue networks are often unstable. Design QR validation to work through brief offline moments and sync on reconnect, and you avoid entry-line gridlock.
5. Are settlement and reporting ready?
The sale is not the end. Build settlement, refund reconciliation, and seat/revenue reporting into the data model from the start to save pain later.
KinoFlare has solved these in production with Evtix and SIDF. If you are considering a ticketing product, reach out anytime.