Use this link to share with your colleagues:
Best Practices: How to Prevent Ticket Resellers from Purchasing Tickets: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1619397
You may run into a situation where you discover ticket resellers are purchasing tickets to your events, then requesting refunds or even submitting chargebacks later. This can cause a few different issues for your organization, such as inaccurate sales projections, a loss of inventory to sell, and fees associated with chargebacks if the bank rules in favor of the ticket reseller.
If your organization finds itself targeted by ticket resellers, there are a few different ways that you can curb the effects from scalpers like them. In this article, we'll cover a few of these options, such as:
- Limiting the maximum number of tickets in an order
- Limiting your Supported Delivery Methods
- Setting up reports to be notified of repeat offenders or large purchases
At the end, we'll have some other ideas you can implement to discourage ticket resellers.
Let's explore these options!
Limiting the number of tickets in a Ticket Order
When ticket resellers purchase tickets they may decide to purchase many tickets at once. You can prevent scalpers from purchasing a large number of tickets by using the Max Tickets Per Order field on your Event Instances.
Because Max Tickets Per Order is a field on the Event Instance, you can set different limits for each of your events. If you'd like to prevent ticket resellers from purchasing a large number of tickets, you may wish to set the Max Tickets Per Order on all of your Event Instances.
Setting a Max Tickets Per Order limits the number of tickets to that event a patron can add to their cart. If a patron attempts to purchase more than the set maximum on the Public Ticketing Site (PTS), they will receive an error message like this:
You'll still be able to override this Max Tickets Per Order limit internally using PatronManager Box Office (PMBO), so you'll want to direct patrons to call your box office if they'd like to purchase more than the set maximum number of tickets at a time. For this same reason, Group Sales won't be affected.
For more information on building events, check out our guide here.
Limiting your Supported Delivery Methods
Ticket resellers and scalpers can take advantage of your Supported Delivery Methods for their operations. Specifically, Delivery Methods like Email and Ship provide resellers with tickets that they can then pass along to their customers.
To help curb the effects of ticket resellers, you may consider limiting the Supported Delivery Methods for specific Ticketable Events or for your inventory as a whole.
You can adjust your Supported Delivery Method either from individual Ticketable Events or for all of your events at once.
Setting up reports for notifications
You'll often be able to spot ticket resellers or scalpers due to certain characteristics of their Ticket Orders. For example, they are often out-of-state or out of the region you'd expect.
Alternatively, you may already know of some repeat offenders that you'd like to flag.
Whatever the case may be, you can set up a report for new Ticket Orders that meet these criteria and either schedule or subscribe to the report to be notified about these purchases.
Below, we also have some suggested filters to help you get started building your report. Keep in mind that these are a starting point; your specific criteria may be different or you may wish to add your own based on the patterns and behaviors of your resellers.
Before building your report, make sure you know how to make Basic Reporting Customizations.
If you'd like to be notified of orders with an address outside of your state, you can set up a report to show you these Ticket Orders with these steps.
1. In the Reports tab, find and select the All Orders By Instance - no Reservations report
To give us a head start, we're going to work off a copy of a pre-loaded report!
2. Make a copy of the report using Save As
Make sure to Save As before making changes! This ensures that the base report remains in tact for the future.
3. Rename your report, then click Save
You may wish to add a Report Description too for your colleagues!
4. Click Edit
5. In the Filters pane, add the following filter
Ticket Order: State not equal to [your state]
6. Click Save & Run
You now have a list of all out-of-state Ticket Orders!
You can further customize this report by adding more filters or by adjusting the fields displayed via the Outline pane.
Don't forget that if you'd like to receive notifications about these orders, you'll need to schedule or subscribe to the report you built!
If you'd like to be notified of orders purchased by a specific reseller, you can set up a report to show you these Ticket Orders with these steps.
1. In the Reports tab, find and select the All Orders By Instance - no Reservations report
To give us a head start, we're going to work off a copy of a pre-loaded report!
2. Make a copy of the report using Save As
Make sure to Save As before making changes! This ensures that the base report remains in tact for the future.
3. Rename your report, then click Save
You may wish to add a Report Description too for your colleagues!
4. Click Edit
5. In the Filters pane, add the following filters
- Ticket Order: First Name equals [known reseller's first name]
- Ticket Order: Last Name equals [known reseller's last name]
6. Click Save & Run
You now have a list of all Ticket Orders made by those resellers!
Luckily for us, that reseller hasn't purchased tickets!
You can further customize this report by adding more filters or by adjusting the fields displayed via the Outline pane.
Don't forget that if you'd like to receive notifications about these orders, you'll need to schedule or subscribe to the report you built!
Other Suggestions
To help prevent ticket resellers from obtaining Print-at-Home tickets that appear valid, even if you've since refunded the tickets, you can use the Organization Info section of your Print-at-Home tickets to let ticket buyers know how to spot illegitimately sold tickets and deter ticket resellers from attempting to resell them.
For example, you could include text in the Print-at-Home tickets such as, "Tickets sold through third party resellers are illegitimate. All valid ticket purchases are made through our website [LINK] or our box office at [PHONE NUMBER]. If you've received tickets from another source, please contact our box office at [PHONE NUMBER] or [EMAIL]."
This will help prevent ticket resellers, especially those purchasing large volumes of tickets, because this would require resellers to download and edit the Print-at-Home PDF tickets.