Securing digital goods: TickPick's partnership with Riskified increased approvals and lowered fraud
Unpacking how TickPick optimizes operations and builds consumer trust through effective fraud prevention.
Meet TickPick
TickPick is a live event ticket marketplace with a simple mission: make buying tickets fair. As the original no-fee marketplace, TickPick pioneered all-in pricing. This gave fans a highly transparent alternative to platforms that hide fees until checkout. Today, the company applies that same commitment to trust and transparency across the entire business, especially in fraud prevention.
Jack Slingland, VP of Operations, has spent 12 years at TickPick overseeing risk, operations, and customer experience. For Slingland, building a safe marketplace remains the top priority.
VP of Operations, TickPick
[Riskified] allowed us to be able to optimize for those high approval rates while keeping those costs down, and driving down the friction that our customers experience.”
The Challenge
Ticketing is a high-stakes environment for fraud. Digital goods sold on platforms like TickPick are highly sought-after and easily resold, making them a persistent target for bad actors. For TickPick, the challenge was two-sided: stopping fraud while preventing false declines.
Traditional fraud-prevention systems rely on rigid, binary approve-or-decline decisions. When a legitimate order is wrongly declined, the merchant loses the sale and often the customer relationship. For TickPick, which regularly processes high-value orders, the cost of getting that decision wrong is high. For example, peak-event moments such as the Super Bowl or similar sports championships can easily drive purchases of $20,000 passes in a single order.
As a no-fee marketplace, TickPick also has to keep operating costs down to support its promise of affordable tickets. The company had moved from rule-based systems to machine learning models, but as the business scaled, those systems struggled to maintain high approval rates without driving up costs. TickPick needed a more balanced approach: one that could block fraud, reduce friction for legitimate customers, and support efficient growth.
VP of Operations, TickPick
Riskified has been a great partner, even when things may not go as planned, they do what’s necessary to make things right.
The Solution
TickPick partnered with Riskified to reduce fraud processing costs while maintaining high approval rates. In November 2024, TickPick began testing Riskified’s Adaptive Checkout. Rather than applying a blanket approve-or-decline decision, the AI-driven system tailors the checkout flow according to each order’s unique risk profile in real time.
Using data from Riskified’s global merchant network, shopping history, and location data, the system automatically declines blatant fraud and approves safe transactions. For orders that fall in between, Adaptive Checkout intelligently requests additional verification, such as a CVV or an OTP (one-time password). Once verified, the order processes smoothly.
Riskified’s Identity Explore extended this protection to both sides of the marketplace. On the buy side, it ensured customers placing orders were who they claimed to be. On the sell side, it verified that posted tickets were valid, preventing fraud from entering the inventory.
Fewer orders requiring human intervention freed TickPick’s risk team to focus on more strategic work as the business scaled. “The percentage of transactions that need agent review has dropped significantly,” Slingland said.
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