Hotel packages, weekend passes and a ticketing platform for promoters.

Caribana Toronto sells for one weekend a year, and half of its sales come in the last two weeks before the event. What it sells is rarely one ticket: it is a few nights in a downtown hotel with an event each day, booked by a group that wants to pay separately.

D'Bandit and Toronto Lime have a different problem. Promoters across Toronto's Caribbean scene need to sell tickets to their own events without building a site of their own, and buyers come from Canada, the United States and the Caribbean.

• Hotel packages. Each hotel has its photos, highlights and package cards by room size, with featured and sold-out states. Booking takes five steps: the dates, the package tier, an event for each day, the names of everyone in the room, and how many shares to pay for now.
• Weekend passes and event tickets. A pass is the dates and an event for each day. Every event page offers single tickets, the weekend pass and the hotel packages that include it.
• Checkout. Prices in Canadian dollars, US dollars or British pounds, with the country set from where the buyer is. Card payments, with pay-later options on Canadian orders, and a short billing form.
• After the purchase. The order page shows the trip, the group and the tickets. Buyers can swap an event for another in the same tier, or upgrade to an all-access pass, which is added to the order they already have.

On Caribana Toronto, a group can pay for the whole room at once. Or the leader pays a share, enters everyone's names and gets a group link to send by email or copy into a chat. Each member who opens it finds the hotel, the dates, the package and the names already filled in and locked, and pays for their share, or more than one.

The order page counts the payments still outstanding until the room is complete, and shows the hotel's confirmation number once the Caribana team has it. Every message along the way, and the page for each state, is set by the Caribana team.

• Promoters post their own events. They sign up at Toronto Lime and add events with the venue, the date and the flyer. Staff decide which promoters can sell tickets and post galleries, and can hold a promoter's events and galleries for review before they go public.
• Ticket types. The promoter sets the types, prices and on-sale dates, a limit per order and a status for each type: on sale, sold out or hidden.
• Live sales. Each promoter sees tickets sold and remaining, sales in each currency, a sales chart and their orders, and can resend tickets to a buyer.
• Galleries. Promoters upload photos from their events, which appear alongside the listings.
• Branded sites, one platform. The sites run on one codebase, each with its own name, logo and colours, and share the same events, accounts and checkout.
• A point of sale for outlets. Retail stores sell tickets for cash from their own POS accounts, each with its own limit. They enter the buyer's details and the ticket holders' names, the tickets go out by text and email straight away, and each store sees its own transactions, can void one, and has its own report. Event pages list the stores and whether each still has tickets.
• For buyers. Search by keyword and by date, prices in Canadian, US or East Caribbean dollars, promo codes, checkout as a guest or with an account, with sign-in by Google, Apple or email, and prices that change automatically when tickets run low or on a set date.

• E-tickets. Each ticket has its own QR code, shown on the buyer's ticket page and in a PDF. On D'Bandit, tickets also go into Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, and buyers can change the name on a ticket after they buy.
• Notifications. The order confirmation and the ticket link go out by email, and on D'Bandit by text message as well. On D'Bandit, Find My Tickets sends the link again from an email or phone number plus the card's last four digits or the order number.
• At the door. Staff scan the QR codes on their phones, with each scan checked against the order.

Both platforms run on designEdit and are hosted on AWS. Pages and prices are cached, so the server only does the work that can't be cached. On Caribana, a firewall turns away bots and anyone sending too many requests; on D'Bandit, repeated purchases are blocked. On both, the tickets in a cart are held for a few minutes so they can't be sold twice. Receipts, tickets and emails are sent in the background, so the checkout only has to take the payment.

The Caribana team manages hotels, packages, events and the group-booking messages in designEdit. On D'Bandit, promoters manage their own events, and staff manage the promoters, the approvals and the reports.