More than 300,000 Olympic tickets were sold despite initial glitches in the online purchase system as the last round of domestic sales started Monday.

A local resident shows his newly-bought Olympic tickets at a Bank of China branch in Fuyang of East China'[s Anhui Province May 5, 2008. The third round of ticket sale based on "first come, first serve" kicked off on Monday, when more than 300,000 tickets were sold nationwide. [Xinhua]

Earlier in the day, buyers could log in and select tickets but there were snags in completing the transaction with the payment.

The situation improved considerably in the afternoon, and the whole process could be finished within 10 minutes.

"The website was a little bit slow at peak hours, but it's normal and there's no problem," said Zhu Yan, director of the Beijing ticketing center.

He said the system - at its peak - received 27 million hits in an hour.

A local resident shows his newly-bought Olympic tickets at a Bank of China branch in Suzhou of East China's Jiangsu Province May 5, 2008. The third round ticket sale based on "first come, first serve" kicked off on Monday, when more than 300,000 tickets were sold nationwide. [Xinhua]

A total of 1.38 million tickets are on sale in this round on a "first come, first serve" basis for 16 sports, including boxing, soccer, volleyball and basketball.

According to the Olympic ticketing center, more than 60,000 tickets for eight sessions were sold out barely three hours after sales began at Bank of China branches and on the official website at 9 am.

The eight sessions include men's football finals, men's basketball preliminaries and men's 110m hurdles semi-finals, which are expected to feature China's star hurdler Liu Xiang.

According to CCTV reports, about 320,000 tickets were sold by 5 pm yesterday.

Although not all the tickets on sale this time are for popular events, people formed long queues early at Bank of China branches.

"I came here at 10 pm last night and I was eighth in the queue," said Lu Changcai, who came to Beijing from Heilongjiang province during the May Day holiday to buy the tickets.

"I tried many times in the previous two rounds but in vain. So I came to Beijing to try again. I wanted the tickets for the men's football final, but now only the semi-finals are available," he added.

Last November, the online system collapsed due to overwhelming demand hours after the second round of sales started, and organizers were forced to allocate tickets by draw like in the first round.

BOCOG had promised there would be no repeat of such problems since the system had been improved.