Paying for a ticket, in whatever way you actually pay for things

A checkout that only takes cards works in London and fails in Kinshasa. A platform serving both has to treat "how do you pay" as a question with several correct answers rather than one default and a list of excuses.

What is accepted

• Cards, through Stripe, including the wallet payment methods people actually use on a phone
• Mobile money, which in much of the world is the primary rather than the alternative rail
• Offline settlement, recorded against the order for cases where money genuinely moves outside the platform

The total appears before the card details

Every fee is itemised on the page where you decide, not on the page where you confirm. This costs conversion — a visible fee is a fee someone can object to — and it is worth it, because the alternative trains people to distrust the number on the event page.

Inventory is held while you pay

Entering checkout places a hold on the tickets for a bounded window. They are yours to complete or they return to inventory automatically. This is why the availability count on an event page is honest rather than optimistic: it already accounts for people mid-purchase.

Failure is explicit

If the payment provider is unreachable, checkout stops and says so. It does not take a payment it cannot confirm, and it does not issue a ticket against a payment that has not settled. A ticket that exists without a confirmed payment behind it is worse than a failed checkout, because the buyer believes they are going.

The confirmation is part of the product

The ticket reaching you is not a nice-to-have on top of the transaction. A completed payment with no delivered ticket is indistinguishable from fraud from where the buyer is standing, so delivery is treated with the same seriousness as the payment itself.