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When resale is discussed in the ticketing industry, the most familiar image is often the same: a major event sells out in minutes, and tickets quickly reappear elsewhere at several times the original price.
That scenario is real, and it continues to shape how resale is perceived across the industry. But data from menta tech, a company that provides white-label, platform-native resale infrastructure for primary ticketing platforms, suggests that it does not represent the full picture of fan behaviour.
According to menta tech data, more than 69% of fans list tickets at market value or below. Of those, 48% price at market value, while 21% price below market in order to sell faster. Only 31% choose to price as high as possible.
The figures suggest that a significant share of resale activity is driven less by aggressive price maximisation and more by practical intent: recovering value, reacting to a change of plans, or prioritising speed of sale over margin.
“The industry often treats resale through its most visible and most extreme cases,” says Iñaki Sanchez Lopez, Co-Founder and CEO of menta tech. “But when you look at actual behaviour, a large portion of fans are not trying to speculate. They are trying to solve a practical need. That distinction matters, because it changes how resale should be designed and governed.”
That distinction is important because it points to a broader challenge for ticketing platforms. If resale is understood only through the lens of bad actors or price spikes, the response tends to focus on restriction or externalisation. But if a meaningful share of resale is rational, time-sensitive and price-sensitive, the question becomes less about whether resale should exist and more about how it should operate.
This is where official resale becomes more relevant. For primary platforms, the value is not simply in enabling transactions, but in being able to apply rules around pricing, timing, eligibility and ticket transfers while keeping the fan experience, brand relationship and operational control inside the same ecosystem.
“Official resale only works when it is competitive with the secondary market outside the platform,” says Martin Haigh, SVP Sales & Business Development at menta tech. “That means it cannot stop at integration. It has to function in practice, scale operationally, and keep evolving through product optimisation, market intelligence, testing and automation.”
That operational layer is increasingly important. Resale is not just about listing and purchase flows. Once it involves pricing logic, transfer rules, payouts, fraud prevention, compliance and support, it starts to behave less like a standalone marketplace feature and more like part of the ticketing infrastructure itself.
This is also where specialised providers have started to play a larger role. Rather than operating separate marketplaces, infrastructure companies such as menta tech enable official, fan-to-fan resale to run natively within primary platforms, under platform-defined rules and flows.
The point is not that all resale is benign. It is that not all resale behaves the same way.
The most extreme examples will always attract the most attention. But if the industry wants to build systems that reflect how fans actually behave, then the conversation needs to move beyond the loudest headline cases and toward a more complete view of the resale market.
