AusLeisure

With ticket sales for singing star Taylor Swift’s February 2024 concerts at the MCG and Sydney’s Accor Stadium having been among the fastest selling in Australia history, it has emerged that consumers have been competing with bots as the queue online to make purchases.

With over four million people attempting to purchase tickets since pre-sales commenced on Monday, the unprecedented demand for tickets has seen Victorian and NSW authorities move to limit ticket scalping.

However, ticketing platform Ticketek advised that, with over 800,000 fans in the online lounge waiting to secure tickets for the singer’s The Eras Tour, it had successfully deterred more than half a billion bot attempts which were successfully deterred.

A Ticketek spokesperson advised “there is no doubt that there are going to be many disappointed fans given the demand for tickets. We are encouraging all fans to follow our helpful tips to ensure their best chance at securing tickets, and to not purchase tickets through unauthorised resellers.”

Unprecedented demand for tickets led Victoria to declare Swift's concerts as major events on Tuesday, in an effort to limit ticket scalping, a move quickly followed in NSW.

Bot attacks are a regular occurrence with online sales of popular items like concert tickets for highly anticipated tours as well as in retail, resulting in lost sales, brand damage from customer dissatisfaction and reduced supplier inventory allocation.

How Bots Work
As explained by Forbes “when a bot wants to purchase a large number of items, it figures out the sales process and determines where it can inject its purchase methods that don't require sitting in a waiting room.

“Human purchasers are put inline lounges/waiting rooms and given the opportunity to buy tickets. Assume you finally get in and see that row 5, seats 1 and 2 are the items you want. When a bot figures this out by having purchased it before, it'll attempt a few different things.

“The first is a batch request. They will attempt to buy as much as possible in one request. “Meanwhile, the people in the waiting room are losing the seats they want to buy. Another technique is via the ‘update cart’ method. Here, the bot buys tickets that no one wants for another event and then goes through the motions of changing its selection. Rather than just going from row 4, seats 9 and 10, to row 4, seats 11 and 12, for the Ice Capades, it changes the transaction to row 6, seats 1 and 2, for Taylor Swift, bypassing the need to wait in any room and still purchasing the tickets.

“Most of those behind these attacks are simply people who want to buy the tickets and resell them. If you see a $5,000 Taylor Swift ticket on a secondary ticket website, this is likely thanks to bots. There isn't much of a criminal element driving the sales. There may be a stolen credit card here or a transaction on someone else's account, but these people know how to run bots or rent a bot to get this done so they can resell tickets on the secondary market.”

Forbes goes on to say “it's clear that bots will continue to be a problem, looming over major sales to disrupt and get a piece of highly sought-after items (with) the Taylor Swift tour ticket release a prime example of what can occur if the proper strategies to prevent bots aren't in place when huge sales happen.

More tickets for Taylor Swift’s will be available in the general public sale today.

Image: Taylor Swift at Accor Stadium in 2018.

Related Articles

29th June 2023 - Promoters announce new Taylor Swift dates as NSW Fair Trading steps in on ticket resales

27th June 2023 - Calls for enforcement of anti-scalping laws in wake of soaring resale prices for Taylor Swift concerts

24th June 2023 - Taylor Swift tour to boost the economy and physical activity?

28th June 2023 - Victorian Government announces crack down on ticket scalpers

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