Delayed Digital Delivery

Hi RJ,  I belive that's a special piece of magic developed for Sydney Opera House by Krystal Nolan . Its one part of the ongoing fight against scalping and has been very effective. 

Hi RJ, 

As Heath has mentioned, I developed this as a part of Sydney Opera House’s war or fraud and scalping. 

It works by using a dummy PAH delivery method online and a simple SQL script. Happy to share if you are interested.

I would love to know more about this how it works, etc.

Cheers, 

Michaela 

Thanks Krysal and Heath - I'll put Sara Covie (our System Admin) on the case - she can see if this is a viable option. 

I would be happy too to understand how it works.

Svetlana

The initial implementation was quite simple. We built a delivery method called delayed digital delivery which is not a PAH delivery method and enabled this online and for our other sales channels. Then we developed a sql script that on the morning of the event flips the delivery method on all the orders to PAH and send them out.

Further to this we built 2 attributes a white list attribute and a black list attribute. When we applied the whitelist attribute it meant those patrons would get there tickets within 30 minutes of booking them no matter what the date of performance. Used for concierges, VIP's etc. The blacklist meant that no matter what a person with the blacklist would never be sent their PAH. The sql script was then added to to adhere to these new rules and was run every 30 minutes on the database. 

After working with this for several months we were able to move some of the rules into the standard workings of our custom website. This now controls what delivery option is available for our white and black list people and we run the sql script once per day at 5am.

Happy to send the SQL script to anyone who wants to explore it, just let me know.

Hi Krystal,

I would love to get those SQL scripts, thanks for being willing to share! We'd probably start with the simpler one too, for just the flipping the delivery method part, although the whitelist/blacklist sounds like a great service as well. My email is scovie@porttix.com. 

Thanks again,
Sarah

Krystal - would also appreciate  some additional info 1) any information on how day of PAH is communicated with customers. The info during the buying process is extremely clear (I  took a screen shot for us to refer to) - just wondering if customers still contact you with questions and how you handle that. 

 2)  Any info you can provide on methods that you use for checking for scalpers who order via print at home - particularly interested in how much manpower it takes to do this well. Know it may not be an apples to apples comparison between our box offices but any info you can provide would give us a starting point. Thanks again! 

Hi R.J.,

1) It has taken us a few goes to get the communications right with the customers. We had a few aspects that we had to tweak to get it right. Firstly we told people that we were going to send their tickets on the day, but not why...Patrons didn't like it, they couldn't understand why we couldn't send them particularly when they had bought them as gifts etc. Secondly, the template that we sent them said Print your tickets and bring them with you. So we had a reasonable number of complaints over the 12 months where patrons couldn't access a printer if they were away from work. Patrons couldn't understand why we needed to send them out the day before, this just made it harder for them, particularly when they wanted to print them. 99% of the time when we explained that a) you don't have to print your tickets and b) we do it because of fraud and scalping patrons were happy, actually on many cases they applauded our efforts to thwart these practices. This ended up in us changing the wording around the delivery method and changing the PAH template to not make printing sound mandatory. Now we get very few complaints that aren't from patrons attempting to onsell their tickets. 

2) At it's peak we had one person full-time monitoring this behaviour. Depending on the week and the shows there were times when we could have had more. While you can implement technical solutions to look for some of the behaviour and pattern, nothing beat the human detective when it comes to identifying scalpers and fraudsters. I also find it helps to have the same resources working on this all the time as they learn the patterns of behaviour. Picking up on naming conventions, email address types, addresses that seem out of place, ticket buying patterns in one event or across events, name changes on records (if your website allows this), all of these things can indicate a scalper behaviour pattern. The other area that take effort is dealing with the patrons that have been scammed. As we have legislation that puts down rules for scalping tickets we regularly assist patrons who have been duped by a scalper. This also takes time as you have to confirm that the ticket isn't valid (if you are not honouring) and then supply the necessary paperwork for them to try and get their money back. All in all it can be admin intensive.

Let me know if that answered the question or there is more info that you are after.

Krystal Nolan I would love to have the SQL scripts for this... mfrench@cballet.org

Does this work in RAMP?