Finding Failed Internet Transactions

If you are conducting Internet ticket sales using Tick-It! Trak Pro, then there are a whole host of situations that could potentially lead to trouble during a transaction. While we wish the Internet was a rock solid and stable environment for conducting business, the reality is that it is not. Customers at your website will visit with a variety of computers, operating systems and browser versions. They will be connected to the web with dial up modems, DSL Line, Cable, or they might be shopping on a school or corporate network. Between your web server and your customer are countless routers, switches and providers that you will never know about.

So, in order to best preserve a customer’s intention when buying reserved seats, especially in a highly competitive market, such as popular concert tickets, the Trak Pro website sales component does the following:

Once a customer’s credit card is charged for the purchase of reserved seats, the VERY NEXT THING that the system does is tag all the seats in the customer’s shopping cart as “RESERVED” for them. Why do this? Well, it is a single SQL Statement to execute, and the probability of a single statement running correctly is high. Following this statement are literally hundreds of individual updates and look ups to finalize the transaction, the probability of failure greatly increases.

So, should a failure occur AFTER the seats are paid for, the SEATS WILL BE HELD FOR THE CUSTOMER, until an Administrator can examine the records and determine what action needs to be taken, depending upon the nature of the specific transaction failure. This way, the customer can still get the seats he/she selected (and had actually paid for).

If you suspect that there have been some interrupted internet sales, you can find this utility in the DIAGNOSTICS Menu, if you are logged in as a user with Diagnostics rights.

You can use this form to locate seats held in reserve for Internet customers, so that you can take corrective action. Click on the SEARCH button to populate the grid with the latest values.

You can click on the CUST button line to bring up the customer record of the selected line, so you can check their tickets held and transaction listings.

This screen is most useful in conjunction with the MIS-MATCHED TRANSACTIONS screen. You can learn more about that by clicking below.