for charity concerts and events. This will apply to events where 50% or more of the ticket price is going to charity, and will require that sellers:
• donate at least 20% of their sale price to the charity involved (or in some cases, to related charities)
• are registered with eBay for Charity
• do not list on 1 or 3 day listings
In addition, the resale of tickets to free events will be banned altogether.
With typical eBay precision, this policy is to be implemented “some time in the next few weeks”; if you’ve got tickets to sell, save yourself the hassle and comply with it now.
What really needs clarification, however, is which events the policy applies to. The beginning of the announcement says “any concerts or events where 50% or more of the proceeds from the original ticket sales are going to charity“, which looks like all charity tickets are automatically covered.
But later it says “we’ll be asking event organisers and charities to apply for their events to be covered by our new policy and will keep you updated on which events the policy will apply to“. If event organisers need to actively join a new program, this needs to be made very, very clear – otherwise the potential for negative publicity from those who haven’t joined is only made worse. Which would be a shame, because this looks like a really good idea.
Other coverage:
- the Financial Times
- Channel 4 news
- thisismoney.co.uk
- The Guardian, which does actually specify that events must be “registered” to qualify
4 Responses
The plus side is that it’ll force many more sellers to use eBay for Charity for the first time when they have tickets covered under the policy for sale.
eBay also need to keep on top of this to ensure that charities are registered.
Most important of all when some concert organiser realises that their tickets are being flogged on eBay and rushes to register, one would hope that any tickets listed prior to an official announcement board post would be left to run as is, exempt from the charity donation requirement. It would be grossly unfair for an item already listed on the site to be forced to add a charity donation retrospectively if they haven’t built it into their start price or BUY IT NOW up front.
Well, that would be event organisers’ incentive to register their event from the start, wouldn’t it Chris? 😀
It occurs to me… if Charity sponsored tickets are legitimately allowed to be resold on eBay with the agreement of all parties concerned it’s going to make it a lot harder for event organisers of non-charity events to winge when their tickets are resold as well (especially for those event organisers who are paid to manage charity and non-charity events) 😈
But might make it easier for them to argue that they want some of the profit (i.e. resale price beyond face value) back? I have seen that proposed a few times before anyway.
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