Virtual Waiting Room Solution: Enhancing Ticketing System Scalability, Optimizing High-Traffic Online Ticket Sales

Established in 1973, a leading Japan-based IT solutions provider specializing in digital transformation, cloud computing, and AI-driven innovations, offers a comprehensive services range, from IT consulting to helping businesses optimize operations and drive growth. 

The company currently operates ticketing systems for major sports clubs in Japan, including professional baseball and football teams. To improve scalability, cost-efficiency, and customization, the client sought to develop an in-house virtual waiting room platform for their online sports ticketing system with functionalities equivalent to their existing one.

Client’s Requirements 

The client company operates an online ticketing system for several major baseball and soccer clubs in Japan. These sports clubs have large fan bases in Japan, with ticket demand surging to anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000 users during ticket sales openings. This high traffic volume often puts extreme pressure on the ticketing system, requiring a robust solution to ensure stability and fairness.

Previously, the client’s system used a third-party Virtual Waiting Room (VWR) service to manage peak traffic and prevent server crashes. However, they met several challenges:

• High Costs: The third-party service was sold as a package, making it expensive to scale.
• Limited Customization: Saled as the Vỉtual Waiting Room package, the system lacked the flexibility to customize the waiting room features to meet specific business needs.

To address these limitations, the client sought to develop an in-house Virtual Waiting Room Platform with features similar to their existing third-party solution but with enhanced functionality and cost-efficiency. 

*** The virtual waiting room is used to prevent significant traffic-driving on-sales from crashing servers. Once the number of users within your “store” (active customer sessions) reaches the preconfigured limit, any additional customers (new sessions) are placed into the virtual waiting room queue.

The platform is required to:

• Scale Infrastructure in Real-Time, Assist in Managing Traffic Spikes – Able to handle a sudden increase in user numbers from 0 to 2 million users when ticket sales begin during major matches and tournaments.
• Ensure System Stability – Maintain a seamless user experience even under heavy traffic.
• Prevent Fraudulent Activities, Enhancing Security – Implement anti-bot measures to prevent unfair ticket reservations from bots or even unauthorized users.
• Optimize User Experience – Provide a fast, reliable, and easy-to-use interface for ticket buying.
• Ensuring Fair Ticketing – Preventing multiple users simultaneously selecting the same seat, which could cause conflicts in the system.
• Support Future Commercialization for broader applications beyond internal use – The system/ Platform needs to be flexible for internal use and even future licensing to be commercialized for other businesses.

VTI’s Solutions

To overcome the challenges of high costs and limited customization associated with third-party virtual waiting room (VWR) solutions, our client decided to develop their own Virtual Waiting Room platform. They chose to partner with VTI as the implementation provider, leveraging VTI’s expertise in cloud-based infrastructure and scalable solutions.

VTI Handles Full-cycle Development

Trusted as the implementation vendor, VTI carried out full-cycle development, including:
Planning & Project management → Requirement definition → Basic platform design → Detail design → Development → Unit testing (UT) → Integration testing (IT) → System testing (ST)

Research AWS-based Virtual Waiting Room Solutions to Identify the Best-fit Architecture.

• Analyze and optimize Lambda functions of a simple source code to optimize implementation
• Technical Documentation – Compiled detailed documentation to present the solution framework to the client.
• Infrastructure Deployment on the client’s AWS account, ensuring seamless integration with existing ticketing operations.
• Pre-Waiting Room Demo – Developed and tested a pre-waiting room function to showcase its capabilities for demonstration purposes.
• Implement Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to enhance development efficiency and streamline updates.

Key Virtual Waiting Room Platform Features

1- Pre-Waiting Room

Implement a pre-waiting room before the actual waiting room starts, where visitors do not receive queue numbers until just before ticket sales begin. For visitors that arrive at the same time, queue positions are assigned randomly at the start of the waiting room, ensuring fairness. Visitors arriving after the waiting room start to receive queue numbers in the order of arrival.
If the pre-waiting room is set to 0, the waiting room starts immediately.

2- Customizable Waiting Room Interface

Allow the waiting room and pre-waiting room screens to be displayed using custom templates that are user-friendly, and match the brand’s visual/ identity.

3- Multi-Domain Support

Manages multiple ticketing sites under a unified system with distinct configurations (distinct settings for different domains). Example: Use the same virtual waiting room system to manage the waiting rooms for a football club, and a baseball club at a time.

4- Multiple Waiting Room Settings

Allows multiple waiting rooms with customizable priority settings for overlapping events. For example, if two different sports tournaments are held at the same time, the system will create two different virtual waiting rooms

5- Queue Position Retention

Ensures users retain their queue position even if they leave the waiting room and return later.

6- Email Notifications

Alerts users when it is their turn in the waiting room.

7- Good Bot Bypass

Allows verified bots to skip the waiting room using User-Agent recognition and bot protection tools

8- IP-Based Access Control

Allow visitors from specific IP addresses to skip the waiting room (for example: use for ticket/ access, promotion program).

9- Real-Time Analytics & Monitoring

Provides real-time insights into waiting room traffic, helping optimize user flow and system stability.

10- Invitation-Based Waiting Room Access

Only visitors authenticated by a specific email address can join the queue in an invitation-based waiting room. Inevitable email addresses can be configured beforehand or during operation. This feature can be used alongside the regular waiting room.

11- Peak Mode Management

Switch between Normal mode and Peak mode. In Peak mode, if the number of accesses exceeds the specified number, the waiting room is triggered. Example: If the maximum inflow is set to 50 per minute, the 51st and subsequent visitors in that minute are sent to the waiting room.

Project Scale

• Development duration: 4+ months 
• Working model: Hybrid (Onsite & Offshore)

Technology used

• AWS’s serverless architecture, leveraging key services such as:
  AWS API Gateway | AWS Lambda | AWS CloudFront | AWS CloudWatch | AWS DynamoDB | AWS ElastiCache (Redis) | AWS SQS & SNS | AWS CloudFormation | AWS CodePipeline & CodeCommit (for CI/CD)
• Backend development: Python 
• Front-end interface development: Vue.js 

Result

The client highly appreciated the platform’s performance, particularly its ability to handle large-scale traffic while operating under infrastructure constraints. The initial phase, accompanied by in-depth research, planning, and comprehensive load test reports, successfully demonstrated the system’s robustness. As a result, the client’s board of leadership approved further development and entrusted VTI with the full-scale deployment of the Virtual Waiting Room (VWR) platform, paving the way for commercialization in other industries

Driving Retail DX with a Smart Virtual Waiting Room

Digital transformation in retail (retail DX) and e-commerce requires seamless, scalable solutions to enhance customer experience. From ticketing to e-commerce, the Virtual Waiting Room system, developed by VTI, optimizes traffic management, prevents system server overload, and ensures fair access, and seamless user experience during peak demand. Built on a robust serverless architecture, our solution empowers retailers to handle surges efficiently while maintaining performance and reliability.

>> Scale Effortlessly During Peak Demand – Turn High Traffic into High Sales with VTI!!