Stubhub

[go birds]

Personally, I like Stubhub.

If anything, I think it's made the prices of scalped tickets go down signifigantly over the last several years. Heck, there was an article in the PD at World Series time where several scalpers were quoted about how Stubhub has driven prices down and there's little market for their services. You see, the fact that there's literally thousands of seats on Stubhub at any time removes the scalpers ability to manipulate the market and create false scarcity on the tickets to drive prices up. It's great.

Yeah, the fees suck, but I'm much happier buying online, picking from thousands of available seats, and having at least some sort of guarantee vs. haggling with some guy on a street corner outside the stadium who looks like he hasn't bathed in 6 weeks, is wearing the same team jacket I had 15 years ago in high school, and smells like weed. If my Stubhub tickets don't scan, I'm reasonably confident I'll get a replacement while the scalper guy has disappeared back under a bridge somewhere with my money never to be seen again. In this age of scanned vs. torn tickets, it's even more important to trust your source.

I know I wouldn't have gone to the World Series this year if I had to drive 7 hours and then trust handing hundreds of dollars to a scalper.

There has never been an instance where i could purchase tickets for an event on stubhub at a reasonable price in comparison to face value. Never.

Tickets for the event I wanted to purchase have face value of $45, $61 after fees etc. I was furiously hitting refresh on ticketmaster until the box office opened up. Event was sold out before you could even purchase tickets. Ahhh, but you just mosey on over to stubhub and buy some decent tickets for $299 a pop (starting price). This is complete [expletive]. And yea, it's the promoter's fault, but stubhub is the enabler.

To me, Stubhub does more harm than good. Yea sure you can purchase tickets for an event that is 7 hours away and it provides guaranteed authenticity of the product. But that's thing, chances are purchasing those tickets are part of a bigger event that your planning, so you're willing to pay a little extra for the tickets.

But for someone like me, who wants to buy tickets for a concert that 10 minutes away, it's [expletive].

If you don't mind me asking, how much was face value of your world series tickets and how much did you end up paying for tickets purchased through Stubhub?

[AdmiralKird]

Blame those who set the face value amount far below demand.

[IMADreamer]

I'll try and say this without being snarky. I think alot of the problem with it, and in a larger sense with America is it adds an unnecessary middle man. You can see it in just about every part of life. We have become a nation where very few actually add value or create, so in order to employee more or for many to make money a middle step has been added. That's stub hub for you. You used to buy from the promoter, now the promoter sells to stubhub and stubhub sells to you. There is extra cost in that because more people have to make money along the way.

It's like my business. I buy direct from the quarry, then shape and finish the granite. Then we dig a foundation and set the finished memorial. My competition however doesn't do that. They buy from a guy like me, so there is the quarries mark up, a mark up from a guy like me actually finishing and setting the stone, then the mark up of my competition. So the cost is more to the customer because more people are getting paid along the way. The health care industry is the worst. I figured once on a doctor trip that between myself and actually seeing my doctor there were five people I had to see or talk to between walking in the door and seeing the doctor. That's a lot of extra cost.

I'm going to sound like my Grandfather but that's the problem with the whole damn country, everyone gets paid for essentially moving paper and money around.

[MrSaigon]

Personally, I like Stubhub.

If anything, I think it's made the prices of scalped tickets go down signifigantly over the last several years. Heck, there was an article in the PD at World Series time where several scalpers were quoted about how Stubhub has driven prices down and there's little market for their services. You see, the fact that there's literally thousands of seats on Stubhub at any time removes the scalpers ability to manipulate the market and create false scarcity on the tickets to drive prices up. It's great.

Yeah, the fees suck, but I'm much happier buying online, picking from thousands of available seats, and having at least some sort of guarantee vs. haggling with some guy on a street corner outside the stadium who looks like he hasn't bathed in 6 weeks, is wearing the same team jacket I had 15 years ago in high school, and smells like weed. If my Stubhub tickets don't scan, I'm reasonably confident I'll get a replacement while the scalper guy has disappeared back under a bridge somewhere with my money never to be seen again. In this age of scanned vs. torn tickets, it's even more important to trust your source.

I know I wouldn't have gone to the World Series this year if I had to drive 7 hours and then trust handing hundreds of dollars to a scalper.

There has never been an instance where i could purchase tickets for an event on stubhub at a reasonable price in comparison to face value. Never.

Tickets for the event I wanted to purchase have face value of $45, $61 after fees etc. I was furiously hitting refresh on ticketmaster until the box office opened up. Event was sold out before you could even purchase tickets. Ahhh, but you just mosey on over to stubhub and buy some decent tickets for $299 a pop (starting price). This is complete [expletive]. And yea, it's the promoter's fault, but stubhub is the enabler.

To me, Stubhub does more harm than good. Yea sure you can purchase tickets for an event that is 7 hours away and it provides guaranteed authenticity of the product. But that's thing, chances are purchasing those tickets are part of a bigger event that your planning, so you're willing to pay a little extra for the tickets.

But for someone like me, who wants to buy tickets for a concert that 10 minutes away, it's [expletive].

If you don't mind me asking, how much was face value of your world series tickets and how much did you end up paying for tickets purchased through Stubhub?

I've been to a few Blazers games for peanuts (well below fv) buying last second on Stubhub. Because lots of those brokers are out of market, if they don't sell on Stubhub they take a complete loss. So if you log on in the last few minutes before the sale closes (two hours before the tip), you can get some really good deals--but still always much better for the weaker opponents and midweek games.

I've never tried this for a concert, but it's worth a shot.

[OmahaCard79]

There has never been an instance where i could purchase tickets for an event on stubhub at a reasonable price in comparison to face value. Never.

I'll just respectfully say you must not be looking hard enough.

I've reached the point where half the time I'm better off buying tickets through Stubhub than buying them directly from the team/venue. I find alot of people buy season ticket packages and can't go to every game, with the economy being what it is, those are tougher to offload than they used to be.

Just a couple of examples...

-In 2010, I scored Field Box Seats for a September game against the Padres on a Friday night (when the Cardinals had been eliminated) for roughly $25 under face even after the Stubhub fees (for a set of 4 tickets that amounted to over $100 in savings).

-In 2009, I made a trip to Southern California and bought tickets on the main level down the 3rd base line for an Angels game. Buying from the team directly for the same price would have put me in the upper deck.

Unless you're looking for prime May, June, July weekend games, Opening Day, Postseason, or games against name teams like the Cubs, you can usually find some decent deals on Stubhub. The fees annoy me, but remember, the Cardinals and every other team in baseball put fees on the tickets when you order online as well.

FYI, just an ultra quick scan of early season games at Busch has upper deck tickets going as low as $5 per ticket. Just looked at a midweek game on May 2nd against Pittsburgh. A set of 3 tickets even with the fees is $25.20. That's $8.40 per ticket. I don't know what the Cardinals single game pricing looks like for 2011 yet, but just a scan of my ticket stubs from 2008-2010 shows me I was paying roughly about $12-$13 face value for the same sections in those years before the Cardinals imposed their own online convenience fees.

[go birds]

Well we are talking about two different types of events here...you're talking about baseball which has a 162 game season.

I'm talking about a concert, a one-time event.

There is a bit of a difference in the two.

[OmahaCard79]

I've never used Stubhub for concerts, only baseball and college football. I've found it wonderful for those events and I've gotten great deals. I could see how it could be bad for one time only events like concerts. Still, I've seen plenty of times before Stubhub where scalpers have snatched up all the tickets to concerts the minute they went on sale. In a perfect world, we could just buy tickets from the venue and not have to deal with scalpers or stubhub, but that's not how it works. Even in cities where there are anti-scalping laws, those rules are rarely enforced or avoided by those with a "brokers" license.

I'm sure it's why I'm going to have to pay $100 a ticket for opening day. It'd be about the same through Stubhub, brokers, or the vermin on the streets. Why? People can't help themselves. They've got dollar signs in their eyes and want to make money. Guarantee, I'll go on Stlcardinals.com and get stuck in a virtual waiting room for a half hour only to be told that opening day is sold out. Then, I'll 2,000+ tickets for sale on Stubhub and hundreds if not thousands more available scattered on ebay or other scalping sites.

It's just the way of the world. I've learned, sometimes you win against the secondary market, sometimes you lose. I've won more than I've lost lately though.

[Spider John]

Well we are talking about two different types of events here...you're talking about baseball which has a 162 game season.

I'm talking about a concert, a one-time event.

There is a bit of a difference in the two.

If you are looking for tix at Stub Hub as soon as they go on sale, then all you're going to see is scalper pricing, but if you wait until closer to time for the show, the prices will drop. You can also check Craig's List, which will let you filter out the ticket brokers so you can buy from individuals,sometime at below face value.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

The moral of the story here is that concerts are the worst.

[jim]

I can't prove it but there is no way that stubhub type resellers aren't a boon for ticker resellers and artificially raise prices across the board. Maybe for an event that isn't high demand it's a different story, but for high demand events it just jacks the prices up across the board. Even the event itself goes up for face value because they know that ticket resellers will gobble them up in mass which causes a supply problem which drives the prices up ...

But it's all you can do sometimes