Event Ticketing Chargeback Challenges, Strategies and Industry Insights

Event ticketing companies face a uniquely spiky pattern of disputes that makes it particularly challenging for internal teams to manage chargebacks effectively. In some cases, they may also have difficulties collecting evidence from across different systems, including systems they may not have ownership of.

Key Industry Challenges:

- Fluctuating Dispute Volume: The ticketing industry experiences significant seasonal fluctuations in sales as well as periodic spikes during major onsales. An internal chargeback team large enough to handle these surges will be left idle at other times, while a smaller team will be unable to handle peak dispute volumes.
- Fragmented Evidence: Transaction, order, and customer data may be split across multiple systems and even multiple companies, with ticketing platforms maintaining some pieces of documentation and venues holding others. This can make it challenging to assemble the right evidence for representment.
- Unrecognizable Billing Descriptors: Depending on how a ticket was purchased, the billing descriptor that appears in a customer’s account may be related to a ticketing platform, a venue, or a parent company. Not all of these names will be easily recognized by the customer, which can lead to disputes driven by confusion.
- Unclear Evidence Guidelines: Customer disputes related to events can be driven by a wide variety of different claims that don’t always fall neatly into the categories defined by card networks. This makes it difficult for merchants to know whether they’re submitting the correct evidence for a particular claim.