Ticketmaster Ticket Resale

THE PROBLEM

Fans list tickets for sale for a variety of reasons. Sometimes plans change, or a person can’t make the event. And other times, fans want to sell their tickets for profit.

Whatever the reason, historically, fans have been left in the dark when it comes to pricing their tickets. They would have to do a lot of guesswork to figure out the “right” price, and often ended up under-valuing their tickets. Our research showed that fans edited their ticket listing 3-4 times on average, and often didn’t even end up selling them.

But wait, there’s another problem. Let’s call the first one problem A. Here’s problem B:

Certain events have a minimum resale price. That means there’s a set minimum price for these tickets. (This is due to a conflict of interest from our merger with Live Nation, who own several venues.) Research showed that for these events, fans will list their tickets on competing marketplaces such as StubHub or SeatGeek. The underlining problem is that these fans will not return to resell their tickets on Ticketmaster.

THE SOLUTION

For problem A, we added an intuitive bar graph and helpful copy to help fans get the true value for their tickets.

Problem B was a little more complex: Even though we could not allow fans to resell on Ticketmaster for certain events, we found a way that they could legally list and sell these tickets on competing marketplaces without ever leaving the Ticketmaster site or app.

We designed Universal Fan Distribution (UFD), a Ticketmaster feature that lets users safely and easily list and sell their tickets across several trusted marketplaces at once — StubHub, SeatGeek, Game Time, and others.

UFD would let users accomplish three tasks:

  • List their tickets (user fills out basic information about their tickets, or they can list directly from their account, which autofills the info)

  • Price tickets

  • Enter their bank account information for if/when their tickets sell and their payment needs to be deposited

I also rewrote the Ticket Resale email journey to cover both regular resale and UFD. Each email can be triggered throughout the ticket listing journey. There are 9 emails total, but the happy path can be boiled down to: user lists tickets, a fellow fan buys the tickets, seller gets paid. Of course, there are additional cases: the event is 7 days away and the tickets haven’t sold yet, the seller hasn’t confirmed their direct deposit account, technical errors regarding the listing, listing was removed, and so on.

The user should be able to grasp the crux of each email and/or the action they need to take simply by reading the subject line. Once the user opens each email, it should be easily scannable; the header and call-to-action button should do the heavy lifting here. Additionally, each path should feel connected as if part of a larger dialogue in unison with the messaging on the web component of UFD.

THE OUTCOME

  • Fans edited their ticket listings half as much*

  • Sell-through went up +13%

  • GTV went up +$40M

*We can conclude that fans they were able to price their tickets more accurately from the start.