How to avoid checkout payment race conditions with limited stock? Rails 8

reno_queen

I am building an e-commerce with Rails 8 and Stripe through their API for a pottery business. These are all unique, one-off items for now and with the demand she already has, I anticipate her site getting hammered once it's up. People will be racing to buy up her stock whenever she drops a new item. I've already got the checkout logic finished and Webhook controller that triggers a background job to create an order and update stock values. My...

Originally asked by Clint Zold on Stack Exchange (stackoverflow) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Race conditions can occur at any stage of checkout, especially when there is a significant gap between supply and demand. In such cases, it’s better to use a First-Come, First-Served (FCFS) approach. A good example is a ticket-booking application: when supply is low and demand is high, they open the booking window but allow only a certain number of users to add the item to their cart. Once that limit is reached, additional users are placed in a queue until the previous users complete their checkout. Each user is given a fixed amount of time to finish checkout; if they don’t, the process stops for them and the next user in the queue gets a chance. Similarly, if an item is removed or updated...

Full answer by Nitin: https://stackoverflow.stackexchange.com/a/79835853 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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