I’m not sure what it’s like outside of Australia, but within it… buying tickets online is a PAIN IN THE…….!
Firstly, it’s worth mentioning that the above ‘feature’ is actually an improvement for Ticketek Australia. I, and countless other users, are much more accustomed to the site just crashing instead. So well done, sort of. I say sort of because the site still managed to crash several times after I finally made it. My wife had some REALLY good seats and guess what? It crashed on the payment screen!
I’ve never worked in the ticketing industry, but even I know that if you’re opening a pre-sale for a Rolling Stones concert in Adelaide, you’re gonna get HAMMERED! Yes, I’m frustrated… this is not a one off for Ticketek, it happens ALL THE TIME for big name pre-sales and regular sales. C’mon people… there are ways to resolve these issues. Contact my mate Oliver Elrewein, he’ll help you!
While I’m on a rant roll, can you please not start the ‘timer’ until users have actually secured some tickets? Sure, if you could secure the tickets within 30 seconds of landing on your homepage then fine… but you can’t. The site grinds to a halt (if it doesn’t crash), but the ‘timer’ doesn’t slow down. No, that keeps on ticking away nicely. Heard of a little thing called accessibility? A user that perhaps couldn’t read so well, or was navigating the keyboard and mouse with one arm, or……. well, they would have little to no chance in securing tickets.
Rant over.
Wow, I actually feel a bit better.
By the way, I managed to secure some tickets in the end. They’re not great, definitely not as good as the ones my wife lost, but at least we’ll see the Stones in what is probably our last chance to do so.
Martial Tester 
Hey David,
Yep, gets me too every time. It even looks like they KNOW it will happen and actually CODED for the fact to deal with the scenario. So why not fix it? In the modern world of cloud data centres and elastic cloud deployments this can be fixed. Especially since this is where they earn their $$$$ I can’t understand why you would not want to process business.
My suspicion with these things is, that it’s not a lack of technical ability. It’s a lack of vision, know-how and pure interest to solve an issue (in this case, earn some more money….makes you wonder if they have enough of the stuff already) at a stakeholder level. Maybe we’re looking at the “Innocents” problem here too (http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/940).
I always try and think if this were my company, how would I react. And in this case I couldn’t ever repeat that here 😉
Cheers
Oliver
btw, Microsoft just went down too. http://hellotestworld.com/2013/11/22/how-to-take-yourself-out/
And this, Ticketek (and others) is why I recommend Oliver!
PS Oliver, you can repeat it here… we’re all friends. 😉
Yep, I can’t remember how many times this has happened to me, it is infuriating.
IMHO this is more than just lack of vision or know-how, its the fact that companies such as Ticketek have no competition in Australia. Hence they don’t have to worry about bad customer experience because if you want to see the Rolling Stones, you either buy it from them or from scalpers. And they know most people would rather try their website again (kicking and screaming), instead of going with the second option.