3 Ways to Stop Scalpers in Their Tracks

Scalpers.

They buy a lot of tickets and then resell them with hiked prices. Worse, they sell the same ticket to multiple prospective attendees. That’s a big customer service problem. They might even issue a chargeback, which creates more work for you.

They’re ruining your customer experience. They’re messing with your brand. They’re taking up too much of your time.

You need to stop them in their tracks.

And, it’s easier than you think.

1. Use Cart Timers

Scalpers sometimes create orders to hold seats and never finish these orders. This makes it harder for your attendees to get tickets since it looks like availability is low.

You can combat this strategy on Rodeo Ticket. Our checkout carts have a timer. If an order isn’t completed in that time, the seats are returned to inventory so other attendees can purchase them. This setting is automatic, so you don’t need to do anything to benefit from it.

2. Limit Order Size

Scalpers also buy a lot of tickets – more than your typical order. Then, they resell these tickets at higher prices. They may double sell the tickets and even issue a chargeback.

On Rodeo Ticket, you can limit the number of tickets people can purchase in an order. To set this number, look at the most common number of tickets people purchase in an order. If you have regulars who purchase more that this limit, you can give them contact information and manage those purchases at your office or over the phone. Use an invoice so they don’t have to complete multiple orders.

From your Rodeo Ticket account, choose “Ticket Settings”, then “Edit Form” from the sidebar menu.

At the top of the page, select the “Settings” button. You’ll see an option to limit tickets in two ways:

  • Limit of Tickets in Cart per Order – the overall number of tickets someone can purchase regardless of event day or time
  • Limit of Tickets in Cart per Time – the number of tickets someone can purchase per event day or time

Once you’ve set your limits, close the window and the settings will save.

3. Block Offenders

If you’re tired of scalpers and chargebacks, you can block the people you’ve identified using Rodeo Ticket’s software.

You can submit an email or mark a specific chargeback to be blocked. Rodeo Ticket’s software then uses multiple identity markers to block these people from making future purchases from your rodeo.

To access this feature, select “Financial” and “View Financials” from the sidebar menu. You’ll see a button that says “View Blocks and Invoices”. Click that button. Then toggle between views from the dropdown menu.

From the “Unpaid Invoices” and “All Invoices” pages, you can select specific transactions to block. Using the block button on the right.

From the “All Blocks” page, you can enter emails to block at the bottom of the page.

Scalpers take the fun out of your rodeo. Using Rodeo Ticket’s tools, you can stop them before they even get out of the gate.

Video Transcript

Edited for clarity.

Welcome to this Rodeo Ticket demo of our new feature that allows you to block scalpers, chargebacks, and even attendees who've been disruptive who you don't want to sell tickets to anymore. Let's get started. 

You'll start by logging into your account. You'll select your rodeo for this year, so we're going to go to our fake rodeo for our demo account. 

From the sidebar menu you're going to select “Financial,” “View Financials.” And then, you'll see this button here that says “View Blocks and Invoices.” You'll click that button, and then you can toggle between three different views. We've got “Unpaid Invoices,” “All Invoices,” and “All Blocks.” 

We'll start on the “All Blocks” page. You can see here that the Alice user has blocked three emails. You can see the total purchases blocked. If you want to drill down into those blocks you can click on the number, and you'll see each email that's been blocked. You can unblock them individually here, or you can unblock them all by clicking this button here. 

If there's an email you want to add, you just add it in this space below and hit continue. Now if you only have one event on Rodeo Ticket,  you won't see the “Apply this to Other Events” option. You'll just get a confirmation message and click save. If you do have other events on Rodeo Ticket, you can select to apply this block to all of your other events. You can apply it to all of the events. Or, you can uncheck this box and a drop down menu will appear with your events and you can be a little bit more targeted with which events you don't want these people buying tickets for. All right, we're going to leave it like this, and we will save. Now, when we refresh the page and go back to the “All Blocks” page, you see that we now have four. There they all are.

One thing I want to note on this tool is that we do use multiple identity markers to block people, so it's not just going to block based on email. It's going to block on other things. We're obviously not going to go into specifics on that because we want to make sure that this tool works really well for you. Just know that we track other things, so it's a pretty effective tool.

The Tucson Rodeo actually had a lot of success using this tool. They gave us permission to share that success with you, so I'm going to navigate to their page to show you what that looked like for them. 

You can see here that Rachelle, their account manager, has blocked 14 emails which resulted in 61 purchases being blocked. That's really good. That's fewer  scalpers getting tickets. That's fewer chargebacks you have to deal with. This is great. 

I want to show you the second way that you can block people, so we're going to navigate to — you can do this from the any of the invoice pages — but we're going to navigate to the “All Invoices” page, and you can see here that a block button appears right next to it. If you want to block that chargeback, you can block it. And then, if you made a mistake and need to unblock it, you can also unblock it as well. 

Now, as you're thinking about blocking people with chargebacks you want to kind of be careful. You probably don't want to block every single chargeback because there can be some more innocent situations, like a lack of communication. Say a wife bought tickets for the rodeo and didn't mention it to her husband. Her husband is reviewing the charges and is like that wasn't us and then issues a chargeback. That's a little bit more of an innocent situation, and not like someone who's like trying to scalp tickets. 

You kind of want to really target these blocks for people who are repeat offenders um when it comes to chargebacks, people who you know have been scalping your tickets, and even attendees who have been really disruptive and caused the scene at your rodeo. 

That's the tool. We're very excited about it. Thanks for tuning in! Have a great day!

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