Pricing:  

One of the greatest motives for buying tickets online is to get a good deal. As far as base ticket prices, Ticketmaster is fairly similar to other certified ticket-sellers. There isn’t any kind of haggling over prices, but prices are relative to where the event takes place, some venues being more desirable. This isn’t the only consideration when buying tickets on Ticketmaster. There are several other things that affect the prices of your tickets.

The first thing to consider is who you are buying the tickets from because Ticketmaster allows users to sell their own tickets on the site. User tickets may be priced differently because the ticket holder sets the price of the tickets. There are also ticket auctions on the site, which have drastically different pricing scales because they are based on the highest-bidder model.

And once you have chosen your tickets, there are a few other charges that Ticketmaster includes in your total bill. The first is the service charge; this is the price for buying your tickets through the site. The service charge is calculated as a percentage of the ticket price, so more expensive tickets will result in more expensive service charges. One of the few things that we didn’t find appealing about Ticketmaster is the variable service charge rate. Many other online ticket sellers have a set rate, but Ticketmaster rates vary depending on the sport, venue, etc.

When you purchase your tickets, you still need to get them into your hands somehow. Shipping charges are just under $20. This is a fairly average shipping fee for online ticket sellers, if a little on the high side. But what we really like were the prices of printing the tickets yourself. Printing your tickets at home will only cost $2.50. This is the best price we found on any of the sites we reviewed. This very agreeable because we find it quite absurd to pay $10 on other websites to print our newly-purchased tickets on our own computers! While it still sounds like a hidden fee, at least Ticketmaster doesn’t take it to outrageous limits.

Features:  

One of the most obvious reasons Ticketmaster made it to the top of our Online Sports Ticket review is the list of features on the site. Ticketmaster simply has the best array of options for finding, buying or selling your tickets. And with such a wide selection of sports and venues, it certainly helps to have options.

When you’re looking for tickets, you can drill down through a list of sports, and then through teams to find the game you are looking for, and Ticketmaster also allows you to search for tickets by city or venue. This is a really useful tool if you’re only looking for tickets in your hometown, or if you want to see any good games in a town you’ll be visiting.

Another important feature we considered when reviewing Online Sports Ticket sites is how many different ways a site provides you your tickets. The standard is to have them shipped to you, and Ticketmaster certainly has that option at a fairly average shipping rate. Next, the will-call pickup, where you pick up your tickets at the event before going inside. It’s like reserving your seat, except the tickets are already paid for when you get there. And Ticketmaster has that option as well. But the most convenient option is, quixotically, the least common among ticket sites. That option is to print your tickets in the comfort of your own home foregoing the wait for them to ship to you. We don’t really understand the need to charge for this convenience when it doesn’t cost anything to the company, but a printing fee is common. Fortunately, Ticketmaster has the least expensive printing fee of any site we reviewed and it’s still far cheaper than shipping the tickets.

If you have tickets you can’t use, Ticketmaster has several different ways for you to sell them to the people who want them. You can post your tickets on the Ticketmaster website and wait for a buyer. Ticketmaster allows you set the price for your tickets when you post them. When someone buys the tickets, Ticketmaster deducts a selling fee from the ticket price before sending the remainder to you. The fee is a percentage of the ticket price and varies depending on the sport, venue, team, etc.

If you don’t want to set a price on the tickets, you also have the option to start an auction on the Ticketmaster site. This means that people can place bids on your tickets over a set period of time, and it also means that you could get more or less money than you expect.

Ease of Use:  

Ticketmaster makes the ticket buying process extremely easy. The main sports site lists some of the most popular sports tickets that are available right now, although it’s easy to find tickets for later in the season as well. But the really useful part of the site doesn’t become apparent until you are further along. When you have found a game that you want to attend, you have the option of filtering the results by price or by the seating area. This is unbelievably useful if you have a specific price range that you must maintain or if there is a specific part of the stadium where you would like to sit. Other sites provide seating charts to show you where you’ll sit, but Ticketmaster goes a step further by letting you search by seating area. It’s a simple feature that’s incredibly useful.

The buying and selling process is also quite simple, and between the awesome search function and the simple buying process, it won’t take long to buy the tickets you’ve been looking for.

Help/Support:  

Usually tech support isn’t a huge selling point for ticket sites, although it certainly comes in handy if there is a problem with your purchase. Fortunately, Ticketmaster has a pretty extensive help section. It allows you to ask questions as well as read answers to questions that other people have asked. You can search through this database to make the process faster. Basically, this amounts to an enormous FAQ that is far more thorough than other sites.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for there, you can also find help through email or phone.

Ticketmaster manages to cover the entire ticket scene and makes it easy to find the tickets you want, regardless of what kind of sports you enjoy. And it’s easy to search through the large database of tickets because Ticketmaster provides several ways to narrow your search down and find the tickets that fit your budget and your seating preferences. Ticketmaster even makes the selling process simple. Ticketmaster truly is the master of online tickets.