Sure you can, or at least bring them down to a very tiny fraction. But like we both agree on, ticketmaster earns a lot of money from enabling scalpers, so they let it happen. It’s not that they can’t, they just won’t.
If they applied what I mentioned, scalpers will cease to exist:
Tickets can only be bought on the ticketmaster site/app.
Resales can only be done via ticketmaster, therefore no one can resell their tickets on ebay or any other site. You don’t have to force ebay to ban resellers, it just won’t work because they’ll have to sell and transfer the ticket via ticketmaster anyway. They can advertise on ebay all they want, at the end of the day they’ll have to transfer the ticket and get paid (the same price) on ticketmaster.
Buyer logs on to ticketmaster and buys the resale ticket there, and the ticket with the rotating barcode is transferred to their account. Seller gets paid via their ticketmaster account.
Tickets can only be sold for the same purchase price or lower (if you want to get rid of it faster), and ticketmaster can’t charge a fee for resales.
Scalpers literally won’t waste their time buying up all the tickets because they can only sell them for the same price. The only way they can do it is to sell to some desperate fan who’s willing to pay more (directly to the scalper outside the app), but they’ll have to figure out how to accompany the buyer through security because they can’t transfer the ticket barcode to the buyer’s phone if they don’t sell through the app. A scalper won’t go through that for every resale.
The only problem with that is ticket transfers on the app won’t be allowed unless it’s a re-sale, so sharing tickets that you bought for your family/friends will no longer be possible and you’ll all have to enter the venue together as a group because all the tickets are on your account/phone only. But that’s a small price to pay to get rid of scalpers.
Rotating barcode is the key here. Ties the purchase to a ticketmaster account and requires a phone be presented at the gate. All perfectly doable, if they were so inclined.
Sure you can, or at least bring them down to a very tiny fraction. But like we both agree on, ticketmaster earns a lot of money from enabling scalpers, so they let it happen. It’s not that they can’t, they just won’t.
If they applied what I mentioned, scalpers will cease to exist:
Scalpers literally won’t waste their time buying up all the tickets because they can only sell them for the same price. The only way they can do it is to sell to some desperate fan who’s willing to pay more (directly to the scalper outside the app), but they’ll have to figure out how to accompany the buyer through security because they can’t transfer the ticket barcode to the buyer’s phone if they don’t sell through the app. A scalper won’t go through that for every resale.
The only problem with that is ticket transfers on the app won’t be allowed unless it’s a re-sale, so sharing tickets that you bought for your family/friends will no longer be possible and you’ll all have to enter the venue together as a group because all the tickets are on your account/phone only. But that’s a small price to pay to get rid of scalpers.
Rotating barcode is the key here. Ties the purchase to a ticketmaster account and requires a phone be presented at the gate. All perfectly doable, if they were so inclined.