Handling peak sales - working with queues

Ticketmatic offers advanced capabilities for handling peak sales. At all times, a rate limiter is active on your account that protects your ticket sales from unplanned or sudden peaks. The rate limiter makes sure your ticket sales will be operational even under unplanned high load. When the limit is reached, buyers will automatically be put in an orderly queue (first-come, first-served) and will be able to proceed as soon as capacity becomes available.

Additionaly, you can define queues for planned peak sales. A queue allows you to define a start date for the peak sale. All buyers arriving in the waiting queue before the start date will receive a random queue number when the sales start and have a fair chance for buying tickets. Any buyers arriving after the sales start will receive a queuenumber on a first-come, first-served basis and will be able to proceed as soon as capacity becomes available.

This functionality is completely integrated in the widgets and the API.

Rate limiter

The rate limiter limits the number of new orders that can be created per minute. If the rate of new orders per minute is higher than this limit, buyers will be put in an orderly queue (first-come, first-served) and will be able to proceed as soon as capacity becomes available. The rate limiter is always active and is part of the SLA.

You can find the rate limiter in Settings -> Queues -> Rate limiter

On this page you can follow up in realtime the status of the rate limiter.

In the graph, you see for the last hour:

Capacity: the limit on the number of order per minute that are allowed
Waiting: the number of buyers waiting in the queue at a certain moment
Progressed: the number of buyers that were allowed access to the ticket sales page at that moment
Active orders: the number of orders that are created but not yet confirmed at that moment

Queues

For planned peak sales, you can define specific queues. Queues are linked to 1 or more events.

Create the queue

Go to Settings -> Queues and click on Add
Fill in a name for the queue, the desired Capacity and the start of the sale.
Click Save

Link the created queue to 1 or more events

The queue is now ready. If you go to the sales link for one of the events that is linked to the queue, you will see the queue page in action.

Managing the queue

At any time during the peak sale, you can adjust the capacity of the queue. This can be used for example to pause the queue when all tickets are sold out but not yet paid. Or it can be used to limit the number of backend requests to the payment provider.

Use the wait message to communicate with customers waiting in the queue. Any message here will be displayed in real-time to all customers in the queue.

You will see a real-time graph of the capacity, the number of people waiting in the queue and the number of people that progressed to the ticket sales pages

Queues integrated in widgets

The queue functionality is completely integrated in the widgets. Queue pages will be shown to the buyers using the same web skin as the ticket sales pages. So no special layout configuration is necessary for the queue.

Queues integrated in API