Comment Not difficult to fix, eliminate politics (Score 1) 307
Stop trying to validate everyone prior to purchase. Let’s call it roughly 1 million simultaneous visitors. Your bottle necks are in the multiple back-end databases that must be accessed to validate identity and eligibility. Why put the bottleneck first? Show visitors prices for various classifications. Ask them to self select their category, show them their prices. Validate their identity and eligibility after they have committed to purchase, if they selected incorrectly, tell them at that point and return to home page. Simple.
This really isn't that difficult unless your agenda is to gather information for political purposes. As a professional programmer, postpone the long running operation until the smaller number of buyers elects. Every visitor will not buy on first visit. It takes a few trips. Allow those visits to not require a real back-end round trip. Give them a wizard to self select and validate on purchase. Takes load off of back-end databases. Speeds response times. Sacrifices nothing other then knowing your visitors prior to purchase. Why is that important? Yeah, good question.