Vivid Seats, the Chicago resale ticket market moves to reinstate payment to suppliers within 15 days after sale.
Starting tomorrow, November 30th,2020 Vivid Seats, the Chicago based secondary ticket market is forcing a change to how ticket brokers are paid. They intend to reinvigorate the ticket resale business at a time when that business is on its heels. Vivid will resume paying ticket suppliers who use their Skybox point of sale system quickly after tickets sell across their platform. This move could lead to Vivid grabbing a bigger piece of the resale market than they already hold. It’s a fascinating attempt to take market share from StubHub which continues to suffer from the taint of Viagogo’s ongoing issues with the UK’s Competition Markets Authority and their own failure to refund consumers who held tickets purchased from StubHub for events which either cancelled or postponed into the indefinite future. Few businesses took a bigger hit from the Covid-19 pandemic than event ticket resale companies. The major players all went from full throttle to stop during two horrible days in the middle of March 2020. These companies: Vivid Seats, StubHub, SeatGeek, TickPick, Ticket Network and Ticketmaster Resale were running at a combined rate of sales exceeding $10 billion annually when the month started. By March 20th they were facing nearly zero revenue and the obligation to refund every single ticket sold for events in the future which would cancel. Those cancellation liabilities turned out to be billions of dollars. As a matter of self-preservation, nearly all the major resale ticket markets stopped paying brokers for tickets sold through their platforms until after events actually took place. The sole exception was TickPick, a smaller resale market based in New York whose co-founder and co-CEO Brett Goldberg decided they knew their sellers well enough to continue business as usual. The shock of the market freezing quickly rippled throughout the entire resale ticketing infrastructure, devastating the companies which bought inventory to supply the markets, the software providers whose technology facilitated the pricing and sale of that inventory and the investors whose capital was now tied up in sales for events which would postpone but not cancel leaving their money frozen.
