Ticketing infrastructure for the country's main event platform
iTicket.az sells tickets for concerts, theatre, and sport across Azerbaijan. We worked on product design and engineering — seat selection, QR tickets, payment gateway, and the operational backend that has to survive a sales spike.
- Multi-phase
- Elvin Sharifov + product / engineering team
- Website · Product design · Engineering
- Live
Starting point
Event ticketing is one of those domains where the system spends most of the year idle and the rest of it under heavy load. A popular concert opens for sale and the platform has to absorb thousands of concurrent users trying to book the same seats. The customer-facing experience and the operator-facing backend are completely different products.
The brief covered both: a customer flow that doesn't lose people at payment, and an operator side that doesn't fall over on a release.
iTicket.az isn't a niche site — it's where most people in the country actually buy a concert or theatre ticket. That means the platform has to scale up for a release day and stay calm the rest of the week, and the brand has to feel trustworthy on both fronts.
Decisions
- Seat selection on a visual map, not a dropdown — sport and theatre customers expect to see the venue.
- QR ticket as the only artefact — printed or on screen, the venue scans the same code.
- Payment gateway with local providers — card payments, mobile wallets — and a quick exit if a method is unavailable.
- Operator panel for event organisers — set up an event, manage zones, watch sales in real time.
- Inventory locked at the seat level — when two users tap the same seat, exactly one wins.
Execution
Server-side rendering with caching aggressively in front of seat-map reads, but writes serialised per event to avoid double-booking. Payment confirmations go through a queue so a slow gateway doesn't block the UI thread.
“Ticketing is one of the few domains where five minutes of downtime can cost a whole event. You design for the worst Monday, not the average Tuesday.”
The interesting engineering work isn't the catalogue — it's the reservation window. We hold a seat for a few minutes while the user pays, release it cleanly on timeout, and prevent the double-booking pattern that breaks venue trust faster than anything else.
Result
- A platform that handles release-day spikes without dropping orders.
- Customers buy on phone or desktop with the same QR ticket on the other side.
- Operators run their own events from a dashboard instead of email.
- Payment integration with multiple local providers — no single point of failure.
- Reservation logic handles edge cases — timeouts, partial payments, abandoned carts — without manual reconciliation.