Tambora - Ticketing Platform for Caribbean Concerts and Festivals
Primary Ticketing for a Dominican Ticket Company
Designed and built a clickable ticketing platform for a Santo Domingo ticket company selling concerts and festivals across the Caribbean: all-in prices from the first view, a live waiting room and bot controls for big onsales, event inventory with holds and a readiness checklist, and an orders view with payment, 3-D Secure and fiscal receipt details.
Most of our work is under NDA. Per agreement, we can share the work but not the company details - all names and identifying information shown here have been changed.
Impact
Dashboard, events list with a board view, event detail with 6 tabs, the live onsale and waiting room, and orders with a quick view panel. A New event sheet walks through the 5 wizard steps.
One price function adds face value, a 10% service fee, a RD$ 100.00 facility fee and 18% ITBIS on fees: a RD$ 2,500.00 ticket shows as RD$ 2,913.00 everywhere it appears.
Map complete, every section priced, fees set, refund and admission conditions written, tax treatment set, settlement terms agreed and onsale times set. Publish stays locked until all 7 pass.
16 events in every status across 9 venues in the Dominican Republic and San Juan, 6 organisers, 9 presales and general sales, and 29 orders from online, box office, resale, comp and accessibility channels.
The Problem
Boletos Ceiba Alta ran onsales on a white-label ticket shop that could not cope with demand. A headline reggaeton onsale took the site down for 40 minutes, bots took many of the best seats, and tickets showed up on social media at three times face value within the hour. Fans complained that fees only appeared at the last step, promoters waited weeks for settlement spreadsheets, and the box office sold paper tickets from a separate system, so the same seat was occasionally sold twice.
Our Solution
Tambora covers the whole life of a ticket in one platform: events with reserved and general admission inventory, all-in prices, a waiting room with bot controls for big onsales, mobile tickets with rotating barcodes, face-value resale and transfer, accessible bookings, refunds, box office sales from the same inventory, and settlements and payouts for organisers.
The Challenge: Fair Onsales at Peak Demand
A big Caribbean onsale puts tens of thousands of fans, bots and resellers on one sale at once, while every price has to be clear to local fans and diaspora buyers, and every seat has to exist once across online and the box office.
Demand the Shop Could Not Hold
Headline shows draw far more fans than there are seats in the first minutes. Without a waiting room, admission rate control and cart hold times, the site fell over and the fastest scripts won, not the fans.
Fees That Appeared Too Late
Law 358-05 generally requires clear, truthful price information, enforced by Pro Consumidor, and many buyers are in the US, where the FTC fees rule expects the total price at first display. Face value, service and facility fees and ITBIS all have to add up the same on every screen.
Bots, Scalpers and Linked Accounts
Purchase limits are easy to beat with many accounts on one card or device. Fair resale at face value only works if the official exchange is the only place tickets move and screenshots of a barcode cannot get anyone in.
One Inventory, Many Hands
Organisers, production, accessibility and artists all hold seats, the box office sells at the counter, and finance settles each show with the organiser. Tax treatment and e-CF receipts are set per event on the client's tax advice, and card data must never touch Tambora's servers.
Our Approach: From Ticketing Rules to a Clickable Platform
Spec and Rules Research
Mapped 9 roles from ticketing operations and risk to box office, finance, organisers and fans, 48 screens (32 staff, 3 organiser portal and 13 fan) and the data model for events, maps, price tiers, holds, sales, queue sessions, orders, tickets, resale, refunds, settlements and payouts. Wrote down the rules the design follows: Law 358-05, the FTC fees rule, Law 172-13, PCI DSS with hosted payment pages and 3-D Secure, ITBIS and DGII e-CF, WCAG 2.2 AA and Law 5-13.
Clickable Demo on a Production UI Kit
Built 5 key staff screens on a production dashboard kit: the dashboard with KPIs, live onsale cards, sales by day and needs attention, the events list with status pills and a board view, event detail with inventory, holds, accessibility and the readiness checklist, the live onsale view refreshing every 3 seconds with queue, payments and bot detection, and orders with the quick view panel. All actions run on local state.
What a Production Build Adds
Integration with the acquirer's hosted payment page and box office terminals (such as AZUL or CardNET), a waiting room (Queue-it or Cloudflare Waiting Room), Cloudflare bot management and Turnstile, Twilio Verify, email, SMS and WhatsApp messaging, Apple and Google Wallet passes, a DGII-authorised e-CF provider and bank payouts. Staff roles, a tamper-evident audit log, load testing, and the remaining screens: seating map editor, resale, refunds, risk review, box office, settlements, the organiser portal and the fan app.
Why It Works: Fair by Design
One All-in Price Everywhere
The design uses one price function for the event page, cart, checkout, payment request and receipt, so the total a fan sees first is the total they pay. In the demo, every price comes from it, and orders break each ticket down into face value, fees and ITBIS for support.
The Onsale Runs From One Screen
Ticketing operations sees queue size, admissions per minute, average wait, abandoned sessions, sales per section, payment success with top decline reasons and bot detection live, and can pause the queue, message fans, change the admission rate or release holds.
Nothing Goes On Sale Half Ready
Each event and each sale carries a readiness checklist, from refund conditions and tax treatment to payments live and load test done. The dashboard lists what is missing, such as unwritten refund conditions or unassigned seats.
Bots Meet Limits, Fans Meet Fair Rules
A randomised queue at the start time, one queue position per verified account, per-card limits and a purchase limit per account work together. Risk flags such as a card token shared by 5 accounts show on the order, and cancelled seats return to inventory.
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21 Merchant Road, 3rd Floor, Singapore 058267
Main corporate office and leadership operations
North America Office
548 Market Street, PMB 12345, San Francisco, CA 94104
Client operations and business development
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402 Shivalik Shilp II, SG Highway, Ahmedabad 380015
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Enterprise Software Engineering - Human + AI
Contact Us
Locations
Global Headquarters
21 Merchant Road, 3rd Floor, Singapore 058267
Main corporate office and leadership operations
North America Office
548 Market Street, PMB 12345, San Francisco, CA 94104
Client operations and business development
India Office
402 Shivalik Shilp II, SG Highway, Ahmedabad 380015
Engineering and delivery center
© 2026 - Copyright. All Rights reserved Oceanlab