Single portal for primary and secondary market tickets

Running a resale platform? Merge all your sales, primary and secondary market, into a single portal. Sales are ongoing for certain shows/matches while others are already sold out, direct all your customers to one single portal where they can purchase any combination of primary and secondary tickets in a single transaction.

Solution

The solution consists in making the quota of tickets available for resale directly on B2C sales channels, along with the primary inventory. The single portal supports both the “seat release” and “ticket marketplace” resale modes.

For this, a new option in the activity profile is available to define what is available for resale (secondary), separately from what is available on sales (primary). It is thus possible, for the same B2C sales channel, to define what can be purchased from the primary inventory, what can be put on resale and what can be purchased from the secondary market.

Note that the “posting on resale” is unchanged, i.e., tickets posted on resale are automatically available on the single portal based on similar rules than for the old C2C platform:

The resale ticket is not retained. Tickets posted on resale can either be release immediately or only after a manual release. For TIXNGO tickets, tickets may be retained until they are confirmed to have been removed from the phone of the reseller.
The resale

Seat release

In the seat release mode, the merge of both primary and secondary quotas is fairly straightforward, as the prices are defined by the rate tables configured in the catalogue. The sales process for the new buyer is completely transparent, regardless whether he/she is actually selecting primary or secondary seats. The available seat categories and tariffs fully depend on the configuration of the inventory set by the organizer. The only potential difference will be in the fees that may have been set differently for primary and secondary sales.

Within the same order and same payment transaction, a buyer can purchase tickets from primary inventory along with tickets being resold be multiple resellers. Those primary and secondary tickets can be from different performances/matches or even from the same one, i.e., a buyer could be selecting on the same seat map two adjacent seats: one from the primary inventory and the other from secondary inventory.

In this mode, the improvements to the B2C sales channel screens described below are also available but are less relevant than for the ticket marketplace mode.

Ticket marketplace

In the ticket marketplace mode, since prices are set by the reseller, the B2C sales channel screens have been improved to easily filter on either types of tickets (primary, resale) and also to clearly identify the “second hand” seats from those that are part of the primary inventory.

The seat map screen comes with new filters and “resale” icons. The seat category and tariff selection screen (a.k.a best available) has also been improved to filter on type of tickets (primary and resale) and display the price range of the resale tickets.

As for the seat release mode, this mode allows for distinct sales fees for both primary and resale tickets.

In both modes, the best available algorithm will return tickets according to the following rules:

Numbered seated sales: The system will return the best available seats, i.e., according to their location in the venue, within the select types of tickets (primary, resale or both), but regardless of the price.
Unnumbered areas & unseated sales: If the ticket type filter is set to “both”, the system will prioritize primary seats first, regardless of price, and then will return the cheapest secondary seats.

Non-numbered seat map

Once added to the cart, seats can be viewed and modified as usual from the seat map. Primary seats can be swapped for secondary seats and vice-versa.

Tickets in the cart are then processed in a similar way as in the old C2C sales channel, i.e., the sales order is processed, with all primary and secondary tickets, and new refund orders are created for each reseller of those secondary tickets. The actual refund dispatch is done from the usual back-office batch.

Known limitations

OPEN PASSES: Open passes posted for resale are not currently listed on B2C portals. This will be added in an upcoming release.

Getting started

Activation

The activation of the single portal feature requires running an initialization script to ensure existing tickets posted on resale are correctly taken into account in the secondary quota computation. Get in touch with our support to request the activation.

Configuration via Activity Profiles

Instead of managing separate B2C (primary) and C2C (resale) portals, you can now manage everything from one place. The Activity Profile now includes:

Enable sales: Defines what is available from the primary inventory.
Enable sales from resale: A new option that defines what is available from the inventory of tickets posted for resale.

You can configure a single portal to sell both, or still maintain separate portals for primary and secondary sales if desired.