Please note that most of what is in this guide is my own rambling advice and as such it should be read with a pinch of salt and a cup of tea. There is no substitute for using eBay safely and doing your own research. So dont blame me if you still get ripped off.

Part 1: An Introduction

eBays role in the business
Please bear in mind that eBay is just as much a part of the ticket touting menace you have been complaining about as the touts themselves. It is shocking just how unaware people are of the extent to which eBay benefits from this business.

An example
Lets take a look at the fees a tout will probably pay to eBay (and these are always being increased), if Mr. Tout sells you two tickets for £80 which have a face value of £50 :

i) Listing Fee – Say Mr. Tout has 8 tickets for a particular gig that he wants to sell in 4 pairs - he puts up a Buy-It-Now listing for which he will pay £3.

Remember that listing fees cant be recovered by Mr. Tout if the auction goes wrong and are paid whether the item sells or not. If Mr. Tout has 8 tickets to sell at £40 each and relists them 4 times he will have already racked up £12 in fees without selling anything. Do you feel sorry for him yet? Didnt think so.

ii) Reducing Listings Fees & Shill Bidding
Touts (and all kinds of other sellers) try to get around this by listing their tickets with standard auctions with a starting price of £1 (as this only costs 25p per listing). The risk for Mr. Tout is that the item will never reach the amount the he wants (or even paid for the ticket) – he will often then shill bid the auction up (bid using another account or get a friend to bid) to a certain amount that ensures they make a profit. If the item doesnt sell for enough and the friend ends up winning, he will agree to a Mutual Agreement Message and a final value fee refund will be granted to Mr. Tout).

Call it a rip off, contrary to eBay’s rules or even fraud but bear in mind that Mr. Tout is probably only trying to achieve the price he thinks that he can get away with (i.e that someone is willing to pay).

iii) Final Value Fee – the biggest cut, charged by eBay on the value of the item when you buy it - whether it be by Buy-It-Now or a standard auction. Have a guess as to how much this is if you buy the two tickets for £80 (exlcuding postage).

Go on guess…

Its about £3.80… that doesnt sound like much but that is on top our £3 for the listing fee and you haven’t even paid Mr. Tout yet.

iii) Paypal – not many people are unaware that eBay own Paypal these days and wow is it convenient (and pretty safe). But someone has to pay for that sleek integrated service. How much does that cost Mr. Tout out of his £80?

Enough guessing games… its about another £3.10

iv) Totals - So you have paid Mr. Nasty Tout a painful £80 (plus £4.25 for postage by special delivery I expect). But he has actually paid £9.90 of that to eBay in fees and charges, that’s 12.4% (okay he may be able to save on some of this by selling more than one pair of tickets for every listing but that is not the point I am making). How many ticket sales are completed on eBay every day? When I did a recent search there were 52,000 ticket listing completed in the last 30 days.
Not all of these resulted in sales of course and not all were for £80 of tickets, but if this worked out as the average, eBay would have pocketed £515,000 in the last month in ticket sales fees alone. But unfortunately its about as accurate as a finger in the wind.

But that isnt his total cost...
If these tickets have a face value of £25 each, we probably need to factor in a booking fee in the region of £1.75 per ticket and perhaps postage (to Mr. Tout) of £3.50 for secure postage per order). This means that Mr. Tout has actually paid £57 for your tickets in the first place.

Im still pissed about paying this guy over the odds...
So, when you are unhappy about the £30 markup Mr. Tout is making (on your £80), he is actually paying £67 for the pair of tickets and only making a £13 profit… so I dont think he is driving to the post office in a shiny new Mercedes is he?

Think about how Mr. Tout is feeling about this – he is the one working hard to get the tickets in the first place, listing them, being called a git by his mates and dealing with your queries, rearranging for the courier to redeliver them to him and standing in the queue at the post office to send them to you.

Not that I would ever condone touting, im just annoyed at how they are perceived as major criminals... Why do crack dealers live with their mums?