Gig ticket sellers should learn from Dice's new refund option

Now in its third year, UK gig app Dice has made a name for itself by selling tickets for some of the world's biggest music acts without additional overheads. There are no booking fees and tickets are tightly linked to an account, meaning all you need to do is pay the listing price and show your phone at the door. The process all but eliminates scalpers, but getting your money back when you can't make a gig hasn't been especially easy. With Refund Tickets, however, Dice has introduced a new button for sold out gigs that gives you your money back if someone on the waiting list wants to take it off your hands.

Since launch, Dice has bought back tickets for sold out gigs, but you'd need to send an email and wait to see if the venue would allow tickets to be transferred. The company would then manually notify people in the waiting list, a process that could take days to complete.

Refund Tickets aims to take away most of that pain, offering refunds on the vast majority of tickets bought via the app. As there's normally a waiting list for most gigs, the app will then alert someone who is eager to snap it up. If they do, the refund is then processed.

Dice says that because it has some more complex arrangements with venues hosting concerts for acts like Adele, it may take a while for the option to roll out to all listings.

With tickets bought via other ticketing websites, owners are encouraged to list their tickets on the secondary market. It's a practice that encourages scalpers, people or companies that use automated online tools to grab tickets the minute they're available and sell on at a huge markup. The government is well aware of the issues faced by normal punters, so it introduced new checks in the Digital Economy Act to curb the practice.

In the near future, using computerised tools to secure tickets could be made a criminal offence, which would be punishable via a fine. The government is already pushing sellers and resellers to crack down on abuse and now requires them to detail exactly where a seat is located before a ticket is resold and inform potential buyers of any conditions attached to it.

The Refund Tickets option is available in the iOS and Android apps from today.