TicketSwap uses Dynamsoft DBR to Validate Ticket Authenticity

About TicketSwap

The ticket reseller market is notoriously fraught with excessively marked-up ticket prices, hidden fees, fraudulent or duplicate tickets, tickets arriving with a seating area not as described, or worse, not arriving at all.

TicketSwap is a consumer-to-consumer platform designed to provide a safe, convenient, and fair place to buy and sell e-tickets for concerts, festivals, sports events, theatres, etc.

To prevent fraud, TicketSwap uses strict verification methods with organizations and partners to ensure all tickets are valid.

TicketSwap has been active for over five years with an ever-evolving platform.

The Need

To process all the tickets uploaded by sellers and prevent tickets from being sold twice, TicketSwap needed to detect every barcode on the tickets accurately and efficiently. For this, they needed a barcode solution that could handle a large volume, as well as a variety of different barcode symbologies – some with damaged or distorted barcodes.

Prior to using Dynamsoft Barcode Reader, TicketSwap used two open source libraries – zbarimg and dmtxread. Since these libraries are no longer maintained, and cannot fulfill their needs for reading damaged and distorted barcodes, they needed a more long-term solution.

"Dynamsoft Barcode Reader outperformed our previous barcode scanner in every way. Also, the fact that it is still being actively maintained and upgraded gives us a lot of assurance."

— Jorian Kalse | Lead Product Manager - TicketSwap

The Solution

TicketSwap downloaded Dynamsoft DBR and tested it against their existing solution. They tested to see whether it could read all the various types of barcodes, as well as images that were known to cause issues such as inverted barcodes, damaged or distorted barcodes that were being misread. Dynamsoft DBR passed all tests with flying colors.

They were particularly pleased that Dynamsoft’s barcode reader supports barcode symbologies that their previous solution did not, specifically PDF417, AZTEC, and CODABAR.

"Dynamsoft DBR exceeded our expectations. With our previous solution, sometimes the image quality was not good enough, and therefore we missed a lot barcodes. Given our volume, that is significant. So using Dynamsoft means we bring our system from 90% scan rate to 100%. It also finds less false positives."

– Jorian Kalse | Lead Product Manager – TicketSwap

The Development

Time Frame

Upon choosing Dynamsoft DBR, the development time of the new barcode scanner only took a couple of weeks, which was mostly due to A/B testing and measuring if investing in this product was going to pay off in the long run compared to their current solution.

Technical Experiments

Based on past experience, the Dev team at TicketSwap were all too aware that it’s easy to over engineer things. Luckily, they avoided that early in the process and in the end created a relatively simple solution.

TicketSwap's application is mainly written in PHP and Dynamsoft’s barcode scanner has a php-extension. However, they could not easily use this since they change PHP versions frequently. It would mean a lot of overhead for the DevOps team to recompile and prepare it.

Then TicketSwap tried another approach of using Java bindings. While it is convenient, it grows their Docker container images too much and introduces complexity to build a bridge between PHP and Java.

"If I were to do it over again, I would not make a Java prototype. CGO turned out to be a good match."

– Jorian Kalse | Lead Product Manager - TicketSwap

Later TicketSwap found a better solution by creating an implementation in GoLang using CGO. It was feasible, and the only tricky part was reading from C pointers. They overcame this challenge by creating small helper functions and calling those from the wrapper.

Cross-platform Support

At first, TicketSwap tried CGO implementation on Linux. It worked well, however, most of their developers internally use Mac. So Dynamsoft ported the binary in Mac format for TicketSwap to compile the Go app on Mac.

"We needed a solution that worked across multiple platforms."

– Jorian Kalse | Lead Product Manager -– TicketSwap

About Dynamsoft

Founded in Sep 2003 with the aim of being the dynamic center of software developers, Dynamsoft provides enterprise-class document capture and image processing software development kits (SDK), with numerous generations for each product. Today many Fortune 500 Companies including HP, IBM, Intel, and Siemens trust Dynamsoft solutions.

• Dynamsoft Corporation
• www.dynamsoft.com
• 877-605-5491
• info@dynamsoft.com