| Quicktics.com
is the e-commerce component for posting and selling tickets
on the web. Due
to the extremely competitive and high-risk environment provided
by sales on the web, the client came to SE with a vision.
Through several highly focused and time condensed interviews
we arrived at a set of well-defined requirements and a time/cost
proposal. Within 4 months the application suite
was designed, confirmed, developed, tested, and deployed. The entire system was on time and within
budget.The entire ticket inventory inside quicktics.com comes
from the TM2000 databases located at ticket offices throughout
the USA. The instant
tickets are brought into inventory in TM2000 they are posted
(replicated) to the Quickticks database.
This is under the complete control of the TM2000 personnel,
as they can tag individual tickets or groups of tickets for
publication on the web. They can set the default value for incoming
inventory to automatically be tagged for web. By changing this value for tickets they
can pull tickets from the web or re-host them to the web.
They can change sales prices directly from their client/server
environment this change is instantly posted to the affected
web inventory. Ticket sales offices, through TM2000,
can also identify a markup (or markdown) for an entire event.
This automatically applies to the relevant tickets on
the web. This synchronization mechanism between
Ticket Sales Office (TM2000) database and the web quicktics.com
database also provides up to date uniformity of all Venue names
and attributes. This
provides the basis for correctly identifying all tickets for
all events from all possible sources.
When tickets are sold, either from the web or from the
office system, they are updated to the other platform at time
of attempted sales. If
the tickets have already been sold, the user is alerted that
the tickets were sold prior to their completion of the transaction
and that they will need to select other tickets for purchase.
The quicktics.com ticket sales operation is extremely
fast in the context of this synchronization. The entire process was designed to be
extremely lean on resources and not require costly “Create
Record” operations during the synchronization process. After the successful completion of a sale,
the customer information, invoice, and invoice line item information
is transferred to the ticket sales office database.
View
the architecture. Visit
this site. For each Web Invoice :
- Federal
Express is automatically sent a request for service (over
the Internet),
- FedEx
tracking number is received,
- the
system creates and e-mail message to the customer,
- a definable
message is inserted in the e-mail,
- a link
is constructed which directs a browser to the tracking information
for this package,
- the
tracking link is inserted in the e-mail,
- the
Invoice is printed to a text file,
- the
text file is attached to the e-mail,
- the
e-mail is sent to the Customer (confirming the shipment,
seats, and link to monitor shipping),
- the
FedEx bar coded shipping tag is printed,
- the
Invoice is printed.
Ticket
Sales Office staff need only pull the tickets on the invoice,
insert the tickets and invoice in the envelope, and slide
the Shipping Tag in the external pouch.
The entire process is recorded to a log file at both
the quicktics.com and TM2000 sites to provide full event monitoring.
Quicktics.com
provides a very fast and easy to use Search interface for
finding Tickets and Events of interest. Customers can specify a geographic location
for all events in that metro area. They can indicate the number of adjacent
seating tickets, their price range for selected events or
tours. Quicktics.com
will provide all ticket blocks, which satisfy their search
criteria. The
Customer selects the desired blocks for addition to their
“shopping cart”. At any time, entries can be dropped from
the cart. The
first party to complete the purchase gets a completed OK indication
and receives the tickets. The Search was designed to avoid reducing
the marketability of residual tickets according to certain
rules defined by the Ticket Sales Office.
This ensures that the web not violate the same rules
which apply to sales which occur in the Ticket Sales Offices
(e.g., do not sell a single from a 2-seat, 4-seat, or 6-seat
grouping). These “block rules” can be relaxed
if market demand for the event is weak.
The software
and data facilities for quicktics.com were technically advanced
and demanding. But
since the requirements were well defined at the beginning and
fixed, the design and development proceeded unperturbed by changing
requirements. The project was a model of the Rapid Application
Development paradigm in motion. The system uses Client Network Services,
which are part of the MS SQL 7.0 system, which leverages existing
software to a very great degree.
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