The volume of complaints accounts for 0.65% of the call volume. Experts also stated that the ticket purchasing website was built based on the unified passenger ticket system, in order to balance all ticket selling channels, during the peak ticket selling period, an upper limit was set for the number of logged-in users and the number of users submitting orders. The situation where "system busy" prompts appear is especially evident during the ticket placing periods at 8 am, 10 am, 12 pm, and 3 pm every day.
Beijing news: During the 2012 Spring Festival travel rush, the Ministry of Railways undertook online ticket purchasing. However, passengers encountered issues such as "slow network operation" and "tickets not booked successfully but money has been deducted." Yesterday, reporters interviewed experts from China Railway Customer Service Center regarding construction and operation. They admitted that although there were plans, arrangements, and preparations, during the peak ticket selling period of the Spring Festival travel rush, there was still a small gap between the actual service capacity of the website and the subjective demands of passengers.
Due to poor performance of the 12306 website in the ticket purchasing process, some people raised many doubts about the construction process of this system, believing that the system had not undergone pressure testing and was immature when it went online, causing unfairness and favoritism towards external companies, without selecting the best technical company.
According to the introduction, during the peak ticket selling period of the Spring Festival, through data analysis, it was discovered that a very small number of users were engaging in large-scale ticket purchases online (some users purchased over 100 tickets per day). To ensure fair ticket purchasing, starting from January 5th, the online ticket purchasing process was adjusted. After users successfully purchase tickets, the system will force them to log out, and if they need to purchase again, they must log back in.
Experts introduced that since January 5th, the 12306 website has continuously experienced over 1 billion page views per day for five days, with a page view increase of nearly 10 times compared to the previous month. On the 7th, the percentage of users visiting the ticket booking website (www.12306.cn) globally was 0.902%. This is due to both the obvious insufficient internet access bandwidth and network congestion causing slow page loading or timeout errors during peak hours.
Railway customer service center construction and operation experts answered journalists' questions, stating that the network ticketing capability is 1 million transactions daily, with a theoretical maximum of 1.66 million transactions, which significantly exceeds expectations.
Cause Analysis
Experts stated that the system design followed the overall technical plan design, preliminary design, feasibility study, and overall technical plan, passing reviews by professional experts. General hardware and software equipment was procured through standard bidding processes.
It is claimed that the system, after being tested and optimized by multiple professional institutions, can meet the design goal of handling 1 million ticket transactions during peak ticket selling periods. However, due to underestimating the demand for internet ticket purchases during the Spring Festival travel rush, during the post-festival ticket selling process, when the daily transaction volume of internet ticket sales exceeded the system's design capacity (reaching up to 1.66 million transactions), the system's performance decreased during certain time periods, resulting in a poor user experience.
It is reported that the People's Republic of China Railway Customer Service Center uses the internet, telephone, and email methods to provide railway passenger inquiries, consultations, and complaint services. According to analysis, the volume of complaints accounts for 0.65% of the total call volume, mainly reflecting issues such as unsuccessful offline ticket purchases despite successful payment; online ticket cancellations or modifications before the trip, leading to delays in receiving refunds.
In addition, recently, measures have been taken to address the phenomenon of user identity hijacking on the website. Currently, the email ([email protected]) has received nearly ten thousand applications for user identity verification. After careful verification, it was found that only a very small number of users were actually hijacked, while most cases were due to forgotten usernames, emails, or passwords, leading to conflicts with previously registered users' ID numbers when re-registering. Relevant situations have been explained to users via reply emails.
Validation Testing Conducted
Furthermore, organizations such as the Western Information Security Evaluation Center conducted validation tests. For vulnerabilities and weak links exposed during the evaluation, improvements were made.
Insufficient Demand Estimation in System Design
Because of insufficient estimation of internet ticket purchasing demand during the system design phase, during the pre-festival Spring Festival travel rush ticket selling process, when the daily transaction volume of internet ticket sales exceeded the system's design capacity (reaching up to 1.66 million transactions), the system's performance decreased during certain time periods, resulting in a poor customer experience.
Since December 28, 2011, when the pre-sale of Spring Festival travel rush tickets began, a total of 89.62 million tickets have been sold, an increase of 15% compared to the 2011 Spring Festival travel rush. Among these, 9.97 million tickets were sold through the internet, accounting for 11.1% of the total ticket sales, and 10.89 million tickets were sold through telephone reservations, accounting for 12.2% of the total ticket sales.
User Number Upper Limit Set During Peak Ticket Selling Period
Additionally, due to network congestion, there were instances where passengers successfully paid but the website showed that the ticket purchase was unsuccessful, resulting in payment discrepancies. According to statistics, from January 1st to 11th, such situations accounted for 1.36‰ of the website's daily transaction volume. (According to relevant regulations of the People's Bank of China, within 15 working days after the railway electronic payment platform completes reconciliation, the ticket payment will be refunded to the bank card used by the passenger for purchasing tickets.)
Data
Experts introduced that after reducing the internet submission bandwidth and inviting well-known e-commerce operating teams to assist in analyzing existing problems, optimizing the booking process, and reducing payment discrepancies, since January 10th, the aforementioned situations have been alleviated.