Hi all,
I'm not sure how we have avoided it for so long, but we have recently found our tickets available on "legally sanctioned ticket resale marketplace."
I know there isn't much I can do to make it stop (or is there??) but I'm wondering if any of you have experience in educating your patrons on how to avoid purchasing from these sites.
Many thanks for your advice,
Lesley
Hi Lesley,
We definitely take a bit of an aggressive approach - we can't necessarily keep these re-sellers from buying tickets, but we can make it harder for them to keep them, and harder for them to purchase them. I'd be happy to chat with you about the policies and processes we have in place to handle these situations in you're interested!
Hi, Lauren!If you have the time, I'd love to learn more about what your organization is doing in the battle against 3rd-party brokers!
I too would be very interested in your approach! We recently found ticket re-sellers in our area photo shopping our logo and information onto their "tickets' and "receipts". They're so tricky!
Hey Alan and Lisa -
Yes, tricky! And also getting smarter. We've done our best to evolve with them, but it can be difficult. Before you read through the below, know that trying to combat brokers is like playing an unending game of Whack-a-Mole. You have to either be, or hire someone who is, willing to play the game and not beat around the bush with these buyers.
First and foremost, we have a ticket limit as stated on our site - 50 tickets per customer per production. This does not include group sales, or sales made through a sales relationship that we have with certain agencies.
Secondly, we have the following language on all of our tickets: "Tickets purchased from unauthorized sources may be counterfeit or otherwise invalid; such purchases are made at your own risk. This ticket may not be copied or reproduced in any form. This ticket constitutes a revocable license and the management reserves the right to refuse admission or revoke this ticket at any time, for any reason."
Those are the front end legalese niceties. Then there's the actual monitoring and managing of it all.
We've got an automated report that pulls new sales based on a number of lists with various criteria. That report pulls 4x/day so that we can catch any bad sales day-of, when brokers think we're not looking (we are!) The lists that populate this report are based on everything from buying patterns to payment type. Once a customer, or a group of customers using the same or similar payment type (indicating multiple members of the same agency) have surpassed the 50-ticket cap the ringleader gets an email from me, or from someone on my team if I'm not available, telling them that the ticket overages have been refunded and their account has been flagged. We don't beat around the bush with these customers.
Customers who are being monitored for overages are CSI'd (a list pulling those accounts is part of our report data) and customers who have gone over the limit for a given production are flagged via a custom icon in the header, triggered by a specific attribute (a list pulling those accounts is also part of our report data). Similar payment types are identified with known data from previous broker sales, going through a List with a manual SQL query based on the first 5 digits of a card (e.g. '42836%') - this part of it isn't foolproof, but if a pattern exists, this will help to identify it.
Rarely will the broker try and fight the cap on their account, but it's been known to happen. Last year we had a very popular show going on in the spring and this one broker had gone so far as to become a donor so that he had the option to buy up some donor seats. When he reached THAT cap, our development team turned him over to me for monitoring; when I put the kabbosh on further purchases, he emailed me posing as a woman who just wanted to go see a show with her husband and her friends, and how could we do this to her --- all with his real name signed at the bottom because he was writing from his iPhone. They're getting smarter, but clearly not smart enough.
This can be very simple or very complex depending on how much data you're working with, or how granular you want to get with it, but more than anything I've found that if you put the work in early and figure out the different data points that could call out a broker, and monitor those accounts going forward, it'll be super easy from there. Happy to answer any questions about ^all of that^ here, or you can shoot me an email laurenc@roundabouttheatre.org
Lauren