I remember a time many moons ago, waiting patiently for a ticketing website to go live with the sale of some tickets for an event my young son wanted to go to - I think it was some sort of wrestling event. However, as soon as the tickets went live, they appeared to be sold out. Apparently it's quite a common scenario where a massively hyped event appears to sell out virtually immediately leaving genuine punters unable to get what they've been hoping for.
There are suggestions that large numbers of tickets get bought "up front" (how?) buy nefarious outs or other third parties who then sell them on (presumably at some additional profit). It's really frustrating for Joe Public, genuinely trying to buy a ticket for something.
More recently, I've experienced a similar issue in a different context. Tee times at my golf club have to be booked online, and until recently sue to COVID restrictions have been restricted to bookings up to 5 days in advance for 2 balls only (two players), rather than the usual 4 ball limit. Understandably this has put some pressure on the booking system. So at 10pm (when booking opens for the fifth day in advance) several hundred people are sat at their phone/tablet/computer waiting for booking to open to get a tee time. Several times I've sat watching the booking page refresh to open, only to see all tee times immediately booked as soon as the page refreshes. I've got fibre broadband, so my internet connection is excellent. But it's clearly not fast enough because pretty much very tee time is gone my the time the page has refreshed.
At least the change to 4 balls from 26 May may ease the pressure somewhat, but I just don't understand how it happens. Is there some sort of secret early password trick?
And then today, Cardiff City released an retro shirt (see below) - much sought after and plenty of forward comms about this. The club's Twitter account announced in a tweet at 10am "It's Back", but by 10.03 when I had it in my basket and went to pay it had "sold out a few moments ago". Judging by the comments that were underneath that tweet I wasn't the only one unable to purchase.
This is either really bad luck on my (and others) part, a crap internet connection (no) or more likely ridiculously poor planning by Cardiff City in terms of their anticipated demand for this shirt. I suspect the latter, although whether it was just crap stock planning or an intentional let's keep numbers low and interest high is another matter (cynical me).
The point of this post I suppose, is that despite the wonderful technology we have at our disposal these days, a combination of poor marketing approach, poor availability and possibly poor systems continues to create frustration for customers willing and ready to part with cash.
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