The ticketing industry is expanding rapidly, with the market size expected to reach $706.14BN by 2035.
Within this broader ecosystem, the secondary resale market already accounts for roughly 25–30% of ticket volume in major concert tours, making it a significant part of how fans access live events.
Despite this scale, the resale experience is still shaped by a friction-and-uncertainty trust gap that often occurs before their second customer journey even begins.
Speaking with CX Today, Jordon McClendon, Director of Product Experience at Event Tickets Center, explains how customers often experience stress and uncertainty when buying tickets in the secondary marketplace, with negative stories shaping perceptions more strongly than successful transactions.
“We do know that it can be frustrating, just shopping for tickets, even in the primary space and waiting in queues,” he explained.
“People hear the horror stories, even though 99% of things are great. Those stories are what stick with people.”
Designing for Low Trust Entry Points
The secondary ticket marketplace operates in an environment where customers often arrive with low trust and high anxiety.
Many users have already experienced frustration in primary ticketing systems, such as long queues, sold-out events, or unexpected pricing structures, meaning that moving into resale channels intensifies customer expectations by higher prices and less predictable fulfilment timelines.
As a result, this creates a baseline assumption that something could go wrong, even before a purchase is made.
“When they come to the secondary market, there's already assumptions that exist about ‘when will I get my tickets?’,” McClendon continued.
"People not knowing when they're going to get their ticket, that's the biggest point of uncertainty, and that's where the biggest frustration comes from.”
As a result, designing a customer journey for this context requires treating uncertainty as the central problem to solve, where customers are not only evaluating price and availability but also assessing legitimacy, delivery timing, and the risk of non-fulfillment.
In secondary ticket markets, supply does not come from a single controlled source, as each seller likely has different rules, systems, and levels of reliability for how and when they transfer tickets, creating fragmentation with no single, consistent process governing the whole marketplace.
This can change the journey from customer to customer, meaning two buyers purchasing the same event may receive tickets at different times, through different transfer methods, and with varying levels of communication and certainty depending on the seller involved, potentially damaging customer trust even if it was outside a ticket platform’s control.
“At the end of the day, we are the face of whoever bought that ticket,” he said.
“It depends on the broker, and in some cases the tickets come sooner, in others they don’t.
“They assume naturally that we own the ticket and we’re the reason it fell through.”
Why Failures Matter More Than Success
Rebuilding trust after a negative experience in the secondary ticket marketplace can be challenging because customer perceptions are often shaped by rare failures rather than consistent success.
Even when most transactions are completed successfully, negative experiences tend to disproportionate weight because those are the cases that define risk in the customer’s mind.
“Even though 99.25% of delivery is successful, that 0.75% matters just as much,” McClendon explained.
This difficulty in rebuilding trust is also exacerbated by the secondary market’s existing reputation, with an awareness assumption that resale platforms are often viewed with suspicion, meaning customers often approach the experience with heightened sensitivity to anything that goes wrong.
