When searching for tickets for the next sporting event, concert or any variety of entertainment events, you want to be sure you get the best price for the seats you want. Sites like StubHub and Vivid Seats make it easy to shop for tickets, but are you getting the best possible price? The answer, in many cases, is no.
These secondary ticket marketplaces are sites most ticket consumers are probably familiar with. What shoppers may not be aware of is the fact that these sites apply 10-25% markups to tickets that could be found at a lower prices if purchased directly from the broker who is selling them.
SeatSmart.com, which touts itself as the first direct broker-to-fan ticket marketplace, aims to help shoppers find those lower prices. By creating this direct connection between brokers and shoppers, SeatSmart is able to offer significantly lower prices for the exact same seats found on other marketplaces.
SeatSmart has more than $100 million of inventory supplied by participating brokers (also referred to as “Preferred Inventory”). SeatSmart guarantees that their final price on any SeatSmart Preferred Inventory ticket is lower than the price the consumer will find on StubHub, Ticketmaster Plus, Vivid Seats, or any other site. If an identical ticket (same section, row and seat number) is found cheaper on one of those other marketplaces, SeatSmart will match their price.
Viewing a Minnesota Timberwolves game that will take place later this season, you can see just how much you’ll save with SeatSmart. On March 2nd, the Timberwolves host Chris Paul and the Los Angeles Lakers at the Target Center in Minneapolis, MN. There is a pair of tickets in Section 211, Row Q for $57 at checkout. The same tickets in Section 211, Row Q are listed for $70 on StubHub.com. On Vividseats.com, the same tickets are listed for $25 each, but when you proceed to checkout the total comes out to a whopping $65 after the service fees are added. That’s an additional fee of 15% that you don’t even know of until you’re ready to buy.
SeatSmart is simply giving the customer a better pricing and buying experience compared to the sites that we are all accustomed to using. SeatSmart’s new approach to the secondary ticket marketplace certainly seems promising, as they provide fans with exactly what they want, which is ticket prices with no strings attached.