I’ve seen a lot of folks mention listing of tickets on Stubhub lately and I just wanted to give you casual ticket flippers an update on who the big boys are these days. Spoiler alert – it’s not Stubhub. Looking back at my sales prior to 1/1/2020, Stubhub was about 85% of my sales that didn’t go back on AXS or Ticketmaster. Vivid would be the other 15%.
If I filter to sales in 2021, Stubhub only accounted for 20% of my sales. Vivid is nearly 50% and the others (Seatgeek, Tickpick, etc) make up 30%. When I look at 2022 sales, I’d say Stubhub is around 5-10% whereas Vivid is prob closer to 60% and then the rest others. I think when Stubhub was sold to Viagogo in early 2020, either because of the sale or the pandemic, they laid off A LOT OF PEOPLE. They used to have a phone number for top sellers, but they did that away. They used to also have an email for top sellers as well. You could chat with them for support. I heard of 3-4 hour wait times for customer service reps. Imagine if you’re a casual buyer who had to wait that long on a call to get support…you’d never want to do business with that company again. That and they refunded people in credit instead of their money back. Thus, ticket brokers AND ticket buyers started to hate Stubhub and thus move away from them.
Vividseats however started to slowly chug away. When there was an issue of a customer needing a re-transfer of tickets, they’d email me and I COULD REPLY BACK TO THAT EMAIL vs those stupid ass donotreply email addresses. They’d read the email and then reply back to me in a few minutes or hours (depending on the severness of the situation.) I never heard anyone complaining about the support they were getting from Vivid during the pandemic. And that’s why Vivid has taken such a large marketshare away from Stubhub. The Stubhub customer experience was so bad that people just stopped using them. I’m honestly still surprised at how fast and howe extreme all of this happened.
The point of the post is that if you’re still selling on Stuhub, that’s NOT the place you want to be selling tickets. I think some genres or events can still do well on Stuhub, but for the majority of events, Vividseats is where you want to be these days.
is ticket reselling profitable? never thought about it before.
I want to move to Vivid but it seems like 95% of the tickets I have to sell are online transfer only which Vivid doesn’t allow until you are selling $10K per year. Hard to reach that $10K with only shows that have PDFs/paper tickets.
Right. That’s sort of the catch-22. Maybe try Seatgeek/Tickpick then.
This is very helpful. Thanks for posting. I’m in Northern Virginia and re-sell tix for 10-15 concerts per year. Always used StubHub in the past but definitely seen a drop-off in service. How do you decide which ticket service to use?
I use Skybox which blasts to Vivid and SH. I also pay for 1ticket which then blasts to Seatgeek, Tickpick, Myticketnetwork, etc.