PreferredSeat.com Blog

Ticketmaster has decided to stop its affiliate program which paid website owners a small fee for displaying Ticketmaster ads and forwarding the clients to the Ticketmaster web site.  They will concentrate on using social media to get the word out and save a few pennies they passed onto the affiliates.

Some of the larger ticket brokers will try to take advantage of the situation and push their affiliate programs. With many of these come more hidden fees for consumers as they get directed to websites that hide service charges to confuse consumers about the true price of their tickets.

Some of the ticket brokers will pay up to 12% commision to affiliates but those costs are passed onto the consumer. They should realize that when they go through the affiliate sites they are paying the commision to the affiliate, and all the markups and hidden fees the broker may have.  To save money you can add “no hidden fees” to your search to find ticket brokers that sell tickets without the hidden markups.

If you’re looking to buy a last minute ticket for baseball’s Championship Series this weekend you have to be very careful where you buy that ticket and the seller has to be careful as well that he doesn’t get scammed. And these are just the kind of sporting events that scams pop up at because of the high price of the ticket and the fans desire to get a deal. And it will get worse for the World Series where prices may start at over $1000 per ticket this year.

Most of the scams involving tickets will come from free listing sites such as Craigslist because there is no way to verify the identity of the ticket seller. Other scams can be found on the internet with websites that have no address and in some cases no phone number either. In most cases the fan won’t find out until they get to the event and find the tickets are no good.

Then you get the low price scams where you don’t see the true price of the ticket until you start entering your personal information and then the hidden fees pop up. Our company even gets customers calling and telling us they can buy our tickets cheaper on another website, until we point out the hidden fees.

For ticket brokers selling baseball playoff tickets the risk is even greater. In most cases if the buyer pays for their tickets by credit card and if they are scammed the credit card company takes the hit or passes it onto the ticket seller.

But the ticket broker must make sure of two things: That all of the tickets he buys and sells are legitimate, and the customer is really a customer and not someone with a stolen credit card. And to do this for last minute sale they may require a faxed copy of a sales agreement, credit card and driver’s license. Or they may just need to call you back at the phone number associated with the credit card to make sure you are who you say you are.

For the customers they say if the deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. For ticket brokers if the customer cares little about the price, where the seats are, and they want the tickets sent to a different address than the billing address for the credit card, the red flags come up.

 We get asked this question all the time. Why can you find the same tickets on most of the ticket broker sites on the internet? Yes, in most cases they are the same tickets. This is the way it works.

 Ticket brokers upload their inventory to one or more of several exchanges. These are databases of tickets that a ticket broker will then display on their website so they can sell their own tickets if they stock any, and all other ticket brokers tickets so they can sell them also.

 So then each ticket broker will choose to display their tickets on their website with either all the service charges included, or in most cases they hide the service charges until you choose the shipping method and then they mysteriously appear. 

 Ticket brokers will hide the total price to make it look like their ticket prices are cheaper, but the hidden fee will jack up the price of the ticket by up to as much as 25% or more. Usually, the higher the price of the ticket, the bigger difference between ticket brokers that include all the fees and those that hide them.

 And it’s not like they are doing you a favor by breaking down the service charge, though they hide it. The service charge you see is usually only a part of the total service charge you will pay. Companies like Stubhub and many others will already have marked up the price of the ticket above their cost when you see it on their website.

 Then they hit you with the service charge which does not give a fair tally of their true profits from the ticket sale. There is nothing dishonest about it. But it’s their reason for hiding the fees that we have a problem with, because the ticket buyer must go through the process of buying the tickets and choosing the shipping method just to find out they are paying more anyway.

 At one time, a very short time, we did the same thing to compete on the web with the other ticket brokers. But we received so many complaints about the hidden fees we vowed we would never do it again. And we hate complaints. You can often tell the difference between ticket brokers that hide their service fees and those that don’t. Check the Better Business Bureau record for each and you’ll see what I mean.