Someone on Twitter asked me to recap how I did on ticket reselling this year, and so I wanted to share some numbers with you guys and compare it to other reselling avenues. I won’t give exact numbers, but give you percentages. First off, overall ROI turned out to be ~36%, but that was heavily weighted towards Hamilton.
- Hamilton (all cities) was 63% of all my sales and came in at 48% ROI.
- If you take out Hamilton, I’m still at a 26% ROI, which I think is still solid
- Hamilton cities ranked by ROI:
- Chicago 118% (don’t do this anymore; this was early on)
- Durham 107%
- Portland 103%
- Minneapolis 96%
- Atlanta 88%
- and so on….. where did New York land? #13 at 52%
- Worst cities – Las Vegas at -9%, Buffalo -28%, Des Moines -40%
- Other non-Hamilton high ROI payouts – Ellen Seattle at 191%, Final Four tickets at 158%, Book of Mormon (one-off) at 109%
- Biggest non-Hamilton losers – Lindsey Stirling NY -100%, Haim PDX -75%, Bob Weir -58%, Maroon 5 Seattle -57%, Depeche Mode Boston -34%, Taylor -23%, Harry Styles -15%
How this compares to other reselling avenues
Back when I was doing FBA and reselling goods, I approximated my ROI to be about 20-30%. I’m not sure what it is these days since I stopped doing FBA, but I’m guessing it can’t be much different. The good thing about FBA is that it’s easily more scalable than tickets. The one downside is that you do have to worry about returns which will cut into your margins. There’s no direct customer service headaches until you get a rock back from your FBA Apple Watch and have to exchange 10 messages with FBA CS to get your money back. Then again, you don’t have fraud risk like you do with Stubhub. And if anyone tells you they are taking home 60% FBA margins at scale, then they must be selling programs like this one.
If you compare this to GC arbitrage, I can tell you those margins are about 2-3%, so if you arbitraged $1 million, then your take-home would only be $20-30K. If you did tickets or FBA, then you’d only have to sell $100K worth. The good thing about GC arbitrage is that you can scale this easily if you had the capital. Also have fewer CS issues than FBA, but more so than tickets.
I’m not trying to promote ticket flips as the end-all-be-all to reselling. You have a finite time to resell the tickets or they become worthless. You can even buy tickets to the same show, in the same section and one person will make money and one person will lose money. One year, tickets could be hot (Coachella last year) and this year, not so hot. You have to have the stomach for these wild swings. The good thing about tickets is that due to all the tickets I’ve burnt, loss aversion isn’t a big deal to me anymore. I used to hate losing money on say a reselling item, but now I just dump it to free the capital back up for another item.