Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gunax | Hacker News Reader

This was the rage among event tickets about 10 years ago.

Of course the simple fix is to just sell items at the market price.

For tickets, the reason was that they were often sold at under-market price, as the comedian/musician/whatever wanted them affordable.

Why are shoes being sold low, I cannot figure out (I expected electronics to be the most sold).

View on HN

Selling at market price is counterproductive when the product is part of a larger strategy.

Selling Xboxes and PlayStations for many hundreds or even thousands of dollars is counterproductive because platform and game developers use the consoles as a loss leader for the much more profitable software and microtransactions. No one wants to buy the new Call of Duty if there are too few console owners to find a match.

Your example of concert tickets is interesting- Kid Rock famously employs counter-scalping methods because he does not enjoy performing for bored rich people in the front row. The front two rows cannot be bought at his shows- they pick "real fans" out of the cheapest seats randomly to come enjoy the best seats.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-...

Or, in regards to tickets. Simply require the name of the attendee on the ticket and don't allow transfers.

True! Though, you're opening up a nightmare for your Customer Success/Support teams. What happens when someone can no longer attend their event? Option 1: Give ticket to a friend, Option 2: Refund the ticket.

If you're looking at Option #2, then you'll need to provide a secondary marketplace for selling off all the last minute tickets that get dumped back into the marketplace.

Source: Past work at a ticketing company

Just give a refund and resell the tickets last minute. You can probably sell them for more last minute.

I would argue that ticket sales are different to electronics and other goods. It's a one-off event which fans go to rather than electronics that may potentially be limited however can be manufactured no matter what.

What do you mean by "no matter what"? Often when new physical products are in limited supply it is because there are real constraints in the supply chain, not necessarily because of an artificial limit imposed by the manufacturer (although of course that can occur as well).

"no matter what" as in of course there will be limitations to how much a manufacturer can output but there will always be some supply further down the line.

That's like saying "there will be another concert down the line". People buy consumer electronics to buy the experience of using them (especially gaming-related) - and using them now, not 3 months after an anticipated game turns to an old memory. Add to that the holiday season, where gifting it now has even more meaning, and it gets worse.

An artist might visit a single city once every few years vs the previous generation of game consoles (Playstation + Xbox) came out in late 2013 so I don’t get your point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com