Understanding how the ticket industry works

Anyone can just join an affiliate program and place a link on their website and hope that it works. Successful affiliates, including myself know that it is not that simple. If you truly want to make money at what you are promoting, you have to understand everything about your product. So before I go and start promoting affiliate programs and helping you succeed, I want to make sure that you understand how the game is played. So let's start at the beginning.

As I stated in my 1st post, there are over 1000 ticket brokers online. What most people do not know is that they all share the same database. Let me explain. Let's say that you wanted to become an online ticket broker. Easy enough, you would design your own website and you would list any tickets that you have for sale. The problem with that is that there are literally thousands and thousands events going on in the USA at almost all times of the year. If a customer were to come to your website, they would check to see if you have tickets for a specific event. Most likely, you will not. You will have some events for sale but I would take a very estimated guess that you would not have tickets for about 99% of the events that they are looking for. So now in order to make your website and your business appear much bigger and profitable, you would probably want to get into a ticket database.

What a ticket database does is literally bring all the online ticket broker inventories together into one database. Currently, there are 2 main companies in the USA that provide these ticket database services, there are more but almost every online ticket broker use either one or both of these databases, and they are Eventinventory (ticketsnow.com partner company) and Ticketnetwork. Almost every ticket you see for sale online is listed through one of these databases.

Eventinventory and Ticketnetwork both offer the same service. If you wanted to list your inventory on one of their databases, they have wonderful packages to sell you.
The advantage of these services are awesome if you want to be an online ticket broker. These companies have a full suite of service from just access to the database for buying and selling to a complete website with every ticket brokers tickets in their database on your website, and yours on theirs.

If you choose just access to the database, you will be able to list your inventory on the database. They will charge you a small fee a month plus 1%-3% of all your sales. This is big because your tickets are not just on one little tiny portion of your website, they are now on every ticket brokers website in the country.

If you choose to also take the website that they offer, well then your little tiny website with less then 1% of the nations events for sale on it just became a huge website with every event in the country for sale and every ticket brokers inventory in the country is on it. That is quite a big difference. So, you see, getting in on one of those databases in huge.

So next, you might be wondering how you make money when you are selling other ticket brokers tickets on your website. Well along with the website that they sell you, they also sell you a Point of sale system. In this point of sale you can keep track of your inventory, accounting, marketing methods and every other thing imaginable. Most importatly, you can control the mark up of the other ticket brokers tickets that are displayed on your website. The industry standard is about 20% - 30% per ticket. So if a ticket broker was selling asking $100.00 for his tickets, your website would automatically list them at $125.00 per ticket because in your POS you went in and marked them up 25%. Because the ticket broker industry is so competitive, ticket brokers have become very creative in making that extra 20% to 30% per ticket.

This is very important on the success you will have as a ticket broker affiliate so please pay close attention. PEOPLE SHOP AROUND WHEN THEY ARE LOOKING FOR TICKETS. Let me say it again, PEOPLE SHOP AROUND WHEN THEY ARE LOOKING FOR TICKETS. More then you can ever imagine. The reason is that the secondary ticket market is so huge that the prices have just gone through the roof. I myself think that it is rediculous but people are still buying but they are shopping first. When they look for tickets online they are mostly shell shocked when they first see the prices for the tickets that they are interested in. Naturally, they think the prices are absurd and they want to find them cheaper somewhere else. This is where the ticket brokers have got creative with hiding their 20% - 30%. Istead of displaying a markup right on the website, in our example this would be $125.00, they wait until the customer is checking out and then they will hit them with a 20%-30% service charge. It is sneaky but in their defense it somehow works.