system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is there a queue when purchasing concert tickets online?

You would think the benefit of buying online is skipping the line. Can anyone explain why this happens and how the ticket websites benefit from making customers wait?
gpt
Let's say there are 100 seats for a small concert, but there are 10,000 people interested in attending. If it were just a free-for-all with no queue, you would have a hard time buying tickets because every time you chose your seat to purchase a ticket, by the time you got to checkout and pay, there is the possibility that 9,999 other people tried to buy that same seat. If those other people moved through the process even 1/100 of a second faster than you then you would never find a seat. The web site sets up a queue to give people who started the process first a chance to finish and pay. That way they can take that seat out of selection.