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As the number of sold out international tours and festivals has been constantly rising in recent years, the topic of resale marketplaces has become heated. The demand for transparent and fair fan-to-fan resale marketplaces has never been so high.
Recent negative media coverage about popular resale marketplaces highlights the necessity of transparency in the secondary ticket market.
Lack of transparency?
In order to better understand the dynamics of resale marketplaces, first we need to understand why individuals visit a secondary ticket site. It is important to establish at this point, that certain secondary ticket platforms do their very best to appear as an official primary ticketing platform in order to deceive first-time visitors.
As a result, inexperienced ticket buyers starting their ticket search in search engines commonly end up feeling abused when they discover that they did not purchase from the official ticketing partner of the event, and most probably paid significantly above face value without having been informed beforehand.
Then, there are cases when an event or a certain ticket category is already sold out and fans are willing to go further in order to secure themselves a ticket. They face multiple risk factors and may very often feel uninformed regarding the source, validity and original price of tickets being offered on several platforms and social media channels. The most important information that fans are searching on the resale markets are:
- the precise ticket category or seats,
- the face value of the ticket,
- information about the seller,
- the validity of the ticket.
Additionally, in many cases there is a complete lack of control over the resale markets from the organizers and promoters and as a result, in certain cases they apply a generally negative communication strategy regarding all resale activity and channels.
This may amplify the lack of trust between fans, even though resale is not necessarily evil, and could actually be controlled by them in a transparent and fair manner.
What solution can Tickething offer?
At Tickething the focus is on transparency, making sure only verified individuals can create a listing. There is always a transparently shown seller profile behind each listing in order to ensure buyers can see who the sellers are, as well as what the face value of the ticket was.
Additionally Tickething offers a plug-and-play API solution which can be connected to any primary ticketing system. With the help of the API, the validity of every listed ticket can be controlled, eliminating the risk of counterfeit tickets and tickets being sold multiple times.
Once a ticket is sold, the original ticket is invalidated and the buyers receive a new unique ticket. This can also be done with personalized tickets, making sure the personal data associated with each ticket is secured even after a ticket has been resold by a fan.
Tickething is not just a user-friendly but also an event-friendly market place with their ‘Control Your Secondary Ticket Market’ campaign. By connecting to their resale API Event organizers can finally control their resale market by setting their own resale rules – whether it be price capping, face value only resale, or by setting a limit for the number of tickets sold by each person. Additionally a lot of valuable data can be pulled via the API, which can support the event organizers’ future pricing decisions.
How it works in practice?
As an example, Tickething has an ongoing partnership with local primary ticketing platform TIXA Hungary, covering a wide range of events including festivals, arena shows and single concerts across Hungary. By using the above mentioned API connection it ensures that fans can buy and sell tickets transparently and securely, while organizers have full control over the resale of their tickets and are allowed to set their own rules.
Tickething is also in partnership with the biggest music festivals in Hungary including a showcase partnership with a week long festival selling personalized tickets (i.e.: name and personal ID number). Through the API connection, the organizers ensured that resale prices are capped and the sold tickets become invalidated while the new buyers receive a completely personalized ticket.
If you would be interested in joining Tickething’s API for your event or primary ticketing system reach out to the guys via partnerships@tickething.com.