Stripe Integration for Event Ticketing Platforms

Ticketing is an inventory problem wearing a payments costume. The real risk isn't the Stripe integration itself — it's a race condition where two Checkout Sessions are created for the last available ticket before either one completes, resulting in overselling a capacity-limited event.

Inventory-Safe Checkout for Limited Capacity

• Reserve inventory at Checkout Session creation, not at payment confirmation — with a short expiry if the session is abandoned
• Release the reservation automatically if the session expires unpaid, so real availability stays accurate
• Time-limited pricing tiers (early-bird, day-of) need to lock in the price shown, not the price at the moment of charge
• Multi-organizer platforms need Connect Express payouts scoped per event, not per organizer account balance

We treat the reservation-and-release logic as the primary engineering problem and the Stripe Checkout Session as the easy part, because that's genuinely where ticketing integrations fail under load — usually during the exact high-demand on-sale moment the whole system exists to handle correctly.