I'm building a ticket-selling application which tracks an inventory of tickets, de-activating them when a particular ticket is sold out.
I'm wondering what the best practice is for releasing inventory back into the store when an order is abandoned mid-way through.
The current flow:
items to an order as line_items and the order is marked as completed on successful paymentitems has a quantity_available that's updated based on their line_itemsorders with no action in > 20 minutes, delete those orders' line_items and update the quantity_availableIt feels like I'm missing something with this. For one, I lose the ability to review abandoned orders in detail (I still have any payments/declines, etc... but no line items). And if a user tries to resume an old order after 21 minutes they'll have to start fresh.
Conversely, it ties up inventory for 20 minutes which could lose us sales when a show is nearly sold out.
Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks.
How about introducing a different tag: reserved or something. While an order is processing, you can mark the ticket reserved which decrements the total inventory count. But you now know exactly how many tickets are in limbo.
During your 20 minute long order, if the number of on-hand items is very low or empty, you can send updates to the user. "Order has been stagnant for 5 minutes. Ticket sales are going fast, please complete your order soon to ensure your ticket is still available."
You can also tell potential buyers that there are x number of reserved tickets that may become available, so they should check back or something. Maybe they could sign up to receive an email if a reserved ticket comes back into the system.