back then, when a user selected seats, they were temporarily "locked" (at least from our end). If other users were "browsing" seats, they would see those seats as unavailable. Honestly, we did this because it was easier to "lock" the seats as it made searching easier for other users on the systems. It lessened the e-mails that said: "I thought I had these seats XYZ picked, but I didn't get them...". We weren't really being nice, but it came off that way.

If a user took longer than the 4 minutes or so there would have had to be more users on the system wanting the same type of seats and none available. This really didn't every happen except for insanely popular events, like NYE or some very popular singer, etc. If after 4 minutes, your time was up. You were taken back to search again, but we said "your last seats are still available. Check out now?".

I cannot say now-a-days, if the timer has more importance and I cannot say from a Ticketmaster standpoint technically. What I can say is how we used to do it.

Edit: added the "Honestly" part, first paragraph.

The timer is/was the worst, I once decided not to buy tickets for an event because the timer wasn't giving me enough time to fill out my CC info and I didn't want to bother rushing or filling out some kind of user profile w/saved card to fit their awful UX.

Timer is not sketchy if it's long enough, but four minutes is probably too short. You need locking for the reasons you said, and if you didn't have an expiration you'd have fun denial of service either accidentally from users deciding not to purchase, or purposely for the sheer malicious joy or from resellers who would scalp a ticket for a higher price, then use their lock to buy the actual product.

Fifteen minutes seems more appropriate, though.

You're kicked back, but it still creates artificial urgency in the sense that it's applied to shows that will take weeks to sell out any given section.

That wouldn't be so bad (airline tickets are similar) except that the "best available seats" function is very unreliable, and sometimes the only choice for picking seats. With no 'new seats if available' option, you're forced to pick blind and under time pressure whether to give up what you have for the possibility of better seats.

I think the parent means that they would revoke the tickets from you and put them back for sale, but there was no reason for the time crunch, because there weren't other people looking for tickets at the time.

The parent author responded and so I changed my comment here.

Originally I had said TM can't predict traffic after you put tickets in cart, so it makes sense to limit timing. However, it seems like originally the timer only was enabled when there were other users browsing the same event which makes sense.