Ticketmaster To Sell Event Tickets Directly Via Facebook If You Just Gotta Have More Cowbell
Ticketmaster is continually looking for ways to make it easier for people to purchase tickets for music and sporting events, and its latest partnership sees the company hooking up with the dominant social network: Facebook. Starting later this month, users will be able to purchase event tickets directly from Facebook — either through the website or through the mobile app.
“By putting the ability to buy tickets directly within Facebook we hope that we’re going to provide a more seamless purchase experience and sell more tickets,” said Ticketmaster Distributed Commerce GM and VP Dan Armstrong. The Facebook purchase option will initially be limited to a small number of general admission events, but will likely expand from there based on user feedback and sell-through.
This is a big win for all parties involved, as Ticketmaster already controls live events pages for artists via Facebook, and extending its reach to ticket sales via the platform is no-brainer decision. As for Facebook, integrated Ticketmaster ticketing means that users spend more time perusing the social network instead of venturing off-site or to another mobile app to complete a purchase. More importantly, Facebook will receive an affiliate fee for each ticket sale from Ticketmaster. Cha-ching!
It should be noted that even though you will be purchasing tickets through Facebook, you still will have to either visit the Ticketmaster website or use the mobile app to claim them. This seems like a rather unnecessary hurdle that you must jump to retrieve your tickets, but perhaps Facebook and Ticketmaster will find a better way to integrate the ticket purchasing and retrieval process in the future so that hopping from app to app is rendered obsolete.
There’s currently no word on if Ticketmaster will hit users with yet another fee for going the Facebook route, but we’d hope that the standard “Convenience Fee” would suffice. After all, there’s only so much that ticket purchases can take, given the inexplicable fee for printing your tickets at home using your ink/toner and paper among other money-grabbing fees.
