Ticket Delivery in 31 Flavors

From its inception, TicketMaster was an oddball business. The company didn't sell something easy to see and define like automobiles or hard drives. Instead, TicketMaster sold convenience. No longer did customers have to go directly to a concert venue or theatre to get tickets to an event. TicketMaster acted as the middleman, handling convenient ticket sales and delivery.

The company saw the promise of the web early on. They hooked up with AOL in 1992 and built their own site in 1995. Their web outlet has made it possible to add a whole new layer of convenience to consumers' lives. But the company wasn't content to rest on its laurels. Instead, TicketMaster is moving forward into new ways of selling and delivering tickets. Ticket sales and delivery in 31 flavors and beyond? President Tom Stockham explains what's next for TicketMaster.com.

Print-at-home Tickets

One of TicketMaster's greatest challenges is actually getting tickets into customers' hands. It's easy enough to sell a slot at a game or a seat at a concert. It's more difficult getting a little piece of paper to the customer. "A ticket is a very sensitive thing for people. People want to have that thing they've bought in their hands. It makes a big difference whether you're in the 20th row or the 50th row. That urgency and that feeling of anxiety people have about waiting to get the ticket they think they've bought is part of what's driven us," Stockham says. The old way of delivery involved shipping tickets through the mail or making customers wait at a will-call booth. But TicketMaster is trying something new - tickets that customers can print at home. "You'll just hit print and your tickets will come out of your printer right then and there," Stockham says. "We have had as many as 70% of the people who buy the tickets online choose to print their tickets the moment they buy them."

Customers like the convenience of instant-print tickets. And TicketMaster likes not paying shipping charges. The printed tickets are bar-coded. Scanners at venues ensure the home printed bar codes match their one unique seat. Stockham says customers also like the instant gratification of print-at-home tickets. "They want the ticket now. We saw some people express an anxiety as in 'I just bought these tickets and I paid for them and I got a confirmation, but do I really have them? Will they ship? Are they in the mail? What's the tracking number?' " Stockham says. With print-at-home tickets these worries disappear - and TicketMaster's customer satisfaction levels rise.

Tickets Go Wireless

TicketMaster is partnering with Verizon to make wireless ticket buying available in the near future.

"It's just the thing for certain events," Stockham says. "If you realized at 4:00 in the afternoon that you actually could get to the baseball game tonight or you could hook up with some friends at a club show later, you don't want to have to figure out where to go to try and buy those tickets." Soon TicketMaster will make it possible to buy tickets from a pager, cell phone or Palm. "There are very, very few places where you can find the information you want as a consumer and do something about it, meaning buy the ticket," Stockham says. Buy strategy books about content and wireless strategies But when TicketMaster's wireless plans are implemented, there will be a better way to get the tickets you want, instantaneously and easily.

Dynamic Pricing - the Tickets of the Future?

TicketMaster is also moving into another futuristic market strategy - dynamic pricing. A partnership with the Seattle Mariners ticket sellers is allowing game tickets to sell on a sort of stock market. "There is a pool of tickets available," Stockham explains. "You go into one of these pools of tickets and you can see the current market price for those tickets. You can either buy them at that moment or you can submit a bid and let that bid stand. So if you said, 'The market price is $16 and I'd really be interested if I could buy tickets for $12,' you can plug in the price of $12. The system will just sit there until the price comes down to $12, at which point they'll notify you that you've got some tickets."

Tickets will no longer have set prices - they'll be priced higher or lower depending on demand. "It allows the market price for those tickets to float and go up over time if people continue to buy at higher and higher prices - or the price could go down," Stockham says.

Dynamically-priced tickets, home-printable tickets, tickets for sale from your cell - it's a brave new world in events' ticketing and TicketMaster.com is leading the way.