Through the last several years, the online ticket industry has been booming. Just like many industries, the simplicity and convenience of eCommerce has created a skyrocketing demand in the online ticket business. Additionally, concert and comedy artists have recently suffered a loss of revenue in album sales due to a rise in online pirating. Consequently, they are forced to make up for the lost revenue by performing live on stage more often. The big ticket companies are attempting to take advantage of the rise in demand as they are creating massive marketing campaigns that lead customers to automatically think of them when they need tickets to an event. By populating the search results by paying search engines to be at the top, advertising for big bucks on TV and littering countless other websites with banner ads, companies like TicketMaster.com are flooding the market. But what does this mean for customers?
Getting literally millions of hits a month, TicketMaster generates most of the ticket traffic for almost every possible event. But just having name recognition and popularity doesn’t always prove to make end-users happy. After studying these sites in detail and reading thousands of reviews, it can be said that the overall user experience of TicketMaster remains sub-par. Allow me to explain.
When entering the home page, you immediately realize that you’ve seen better websites. Severely cluttered and mashed together, you find your way to the search (since at least it’s something you can make out of the mess). Once you search for the artist you need, you get to the venue map and a few filters. The filters seem completely unnecessary, and you’ll probably find yourself saying “JUST LET ME SEE THE TICKETS!”
After completing this search, you are sent to one of the worst pages I’ve ever seen: a “help battle the bots” page. This page makes it appear they want to ensure you are a human, but instead forces you type a phrase that is part of an advertisement. Once you get that right, you’re sent to a “working” page for about five seconds, which makes it look that the system is searching for your tickets. But this page is just another opportunity to throw another advertisement at you. Nowadays, calling a search parameter from a database takes only milliseconds, making this page a complete waste of your time.
After this entire process, you see that there are no tickets available about 80 percent of the time. If you get lucky enough to find tickets, you are limited to only a few minutes to make your move or else you get “sorry, time’s up.” In order to return, you need to type another phrase from an advertisement. And before checking out, they try to promote a bunch of other products to add to your cart that are completely unrelated to tickets (like mp3s, t-shirts, etc).
All this just to get a couple of cheap concert tickets? Are you kidding me?
Obviously no one wants to be bothered by obstacles when making online purchases, but TicketMaster appears to purposely delay the buying process. Whether it’s sidetracking you with advertisements, marketing other products or just forcing you to navigate aimlessly through the site, they apparently don’t care. Very recently, they attempted to address some of these issues with an update to how the site uses CAPTCHA in order to eliminate bots. But the only difference since the update has been the clarity of the CAPTCHA. They still exist, complete with annoying promotions that keeps this as just another annoying step during the buying process. So what is there to do now?
As a customer, the easiest solution to avoiding these complicated and unfriendly ticket sites is to simply do your homework. When searching for tickets for an artist or event, browse through the sites that you may not have heard of. You can find some terrific ticket broker sites that may not come up as #1 but implement a superb user experience. Look for sites that limit advertisements, fully utilize the search function, optimize loading time and provide you with useful up-to-date information. You will quickly realize there are other fish in the sea.
I’ve done some research on a few ticket sites that I recommend. Here’s what I came up with.
1) StubHub.com has a very well-known following already due to their extensive marking strategies, but they deserve to be acknowledged as a quality ticket site. As of a few years ago, StubHub was put in the same category as TicketMaster as a confusing and unpleasant site to buy tickets. At one point, they went as far as telling you where they were going to seat you. Recently, the site has undergone maintenance that strictly concentrates on a better user experiences. As a result, their venue maps are some of the most integrated in the business, and you are never more than a few clicks away from buying tickets.
2) SeatGeek.com has proven to be one of the easiest ticket sites to use, primarily based on their terrific search function that is used to effectively show all available tickets. SeatGeek is essentially a ticket search engine that uses a collaboration of tickets from many different sources, which allows them to have one of the largest selections anywhere on the internet. This allows users to choose not only price, but which company the tickets come from.
3) TonsOfTickets.com is a highly recommended ticket site that focuses on every facet of providing the best user experience possible. Navigation through the site is lightning fast while always delivering the most relevant and up-to-date event information. TonsOfTickets has a great feature that provides an actual image of the seat’s view inside the venue of your choice. Also, the site recently added the ability to filter tickets by the ones that you can receive instantly by email.
