Online shopping makes it both easy and difficult to find what you’re looking for. Whether you’re reserving tickets to your favorite artist or waiting for checkout to load with a collectible in your cart, you can’t always guarantee a purchase.
This is largely due to scalpers. These individuals are a dangerous force for certain industries, and these industries push back on scalpers to provide quality service to loyal customers. Read on to learn more about how scalpers affect the reselling industry.
What Is Scalping?
Scalping refers to purchasing large quantities of in-demand items with the purpose of buying out the stock and reselling it at higher prices. This is different from other reselling methods, such as buying and reselling items like toys, because scalpers target popular products to increase their profit yield to insurmountable numbers.
Scalpers affect all kinds of industries through their predatory reselling practices. This makes it difficult for fans and loyal consumers to support their favorite industries or artists.
Consumer Frustrations With Bots
How can these scalpers purchase so many products in such a limited amount of time? Tech-savvy scalpers often use automated bots to sit in online queues and purchase the maximum number of products or tickets possible. Consumers have a hard time competing with these bots, so they miss out on these opportunities.
Inflated Prices for Concert Tickets
One of the most prominent areas that scalpers target is concert tickets for major and upcoming artists. By buying out front-row seats of a tour, scalpers can raise the prices of these tickets, often up to three times the original value. Instead of loyal fans supporting their local artists and visiting the show, they either skip out on the entire experience or put money in the pockets of manipulative resellers.
Limited Supply of Collectible Items
Collectible items, like figurines, sneakers, and vinyl records, are other products that scalpers strike. They often buy these limited-stock items at retail value and then raise the price to gain a hefty profit.
To complete their collections, loyal collectors need to beat out these automated bots. Unfortunately, this is very difficult and is nigh on impossible for the most sought-after collectibles.
New Business and Policy Standards
Consumers have shared their frustration regarding scalping practices, and businesses have been listening. With new policies and protocols, industries mitigate scalping by incorporating these policies:
- strict cyber security against bots
- limiting purchases per person
- implementing verified fan services so loyal consumers are first in line
Creating a stable marketplace gives sales back to industries and out of arms reach from scalpers.
As scalpers continue to insert themselves in different industries, advanced technology and new regulations attempt to prevent the practice from spreading. By staying educated on the latest updates, you can be wary of scalpers and shop for your next collector’s item or ticket with more ease.