eBay Veteran Chris Tsakalakis eBay Vice President, Advanced Solutions is to move to help manage StubHub and the overall eBay Tickets business as reported by Fruity.
Tickets is an area that really needs some experience and not one eBay has a particularly good reputation in. On the one hand many promoters decry touts and have often cancelled tickets resold on eBay, so much so that it’s notable when a promoter such as Affiliate Summit suggest buying on eBay when the official sources have sold out.
Even worse eBay have come under fire when charity concert tickets such as Live 8 and Concert for Diana appear on the site. eBay have taken the decision to ban tickets for certain charity events in the past, but this again raises questions. Why aren’t the organisers selling tickets at higher prices raising more money for charity if people are willing to pay? Why don’t the organisers themselves auction a certain number of tickets on eBay?
eBay in Australia recently took Australia’s Big Day Out concert to court (and won) for threatening to cancel tickets sold online. Big Day Out organisers claimed selling on eBay was depriving audience members of buying tickets at the right price but as per usual fail to explain why a fan shouldn’t bid whatever they see fit even if that is many times the original price of the ticket. Surely if organisers are that concerned that genuine fans should be able to buy tickets they should find better ways to sell and distribute them in the first place? If they can’t or won’t why complain that others do supply fans with tickets, albeit at a price?
At the end of the day almost all complaints about resale of tickets could simply be solved by promoters issuing them to named individuals and insisting on Photo ID to gain entrance. If they fail to do so they have little cause to complain when tickets change hands.
Tsakalakis is moving to an area full of controversy, but recently with the changes in visibility of shop inventory format (twice in a year) he should be used to that. No doubt he will relish the challenge!
