What Your Ticketmaster “Order Processing Fee” Is Really Used For

 I know the fees are insane. But how can a company subsist? Really. They provide online tickets, they NEED to charge a fee. Would it be better if it was hidden?

fair enough

That dog line is hilarious! Also, I hope the “sell your own tickets”  strategy you suggest is adopted by my three favourite bands: Dinosaur Petting Zoo, Champagne Shampoo, and Hover Swivel Chairs.

As someone who works at TM, this is just stupid and immature. 
Drag your lazy ass to the box office if you don’t want to pay the online fees.

I used to work at TM a couple of years ago and I know that the fees are ridiculous, but they all do something.

The convenience charge is to make profit, since the ticket price goes to the performers, venue, etc. The order processing fee (as it was explained to me) is to ensure that some profit is made if the show gets cancelled or refunded. I was also told that it payed the printer to print the tickets. 

When I was working there, despite all the charges on top of the ticket prices, I was always told we were still losing money. Admittedly, the charges were way higher in the States then they were for Canadians (in my opinion) but Americans seemed to be more complacent with the idea of surcharges for some reason. 

My customers would always ask what they could do to avoid the charges and I’d just tell them that 90% of the time, you could just go to the venue (the other 10% is for when the venue didn’t have a box office, as was the case for small shows). Once I told them that though, a lot of them would buy through us because they didn’t want to have to commute to get there (the box office hours are really inconvenient most of the time).

The $14/15 is for courier, which is exactly what it means (at least in Canada), it costs the same to courier something via Canada Post, which is how we’d do it. Standard mail is free, and if you’re worried that they won’t arrive, you can have them wait for you at the box office (which is also what happens if they somehow get lost in the mail). 

The one fee that I could never explain was TicketFast, which was either $1.75 or $2.50, depending on the event. I could never justify paying for a PDF to be emailed to you when you could get mail for free… 

Full disclosure: for some events TF was free, but keep in mind that I used to work there a couple of years ago. I’m not sure if they still do all these fees for the reasons that I listed since I never go out to concerts/shows, and when I do, I go to the box office. This was even when I was working there, partially because nothing interested me and also because I had to place an order on credit card to get tickets without the fees through TM.

Despite how I felt about their practices, I really liked working at TM. I worked in the call centre and a lot of the customers that called in were pretty nice, even when they were angry. Plus, I got to listen to stories from people all around the world, some were hilarious and inspiring and some were really sad.

I didn’t expect to write this much but thanks for writing this article. Reflecting on my time there was actually pretty cool.

Yawnnnnnn…heard this before.   You obviously know nothing about the ticketing business.  In most cases, TM gets a very small percentage of these fees.  Most go to the promoter and the venue.  TM has to make at least a little money off of each ticket.  If you don’t want to pay the extra fees, then head to the venue box office, douchebag.

ticketmaster doesn’t need to exist in the first place. lots of artists and venues sell tickets for their shows directly and get by fine.  i have a real hate for unnecessary middlemen. down with ticketmaster!

Error. It’s Luciano Pavarotti, not Luciano Pavoratti.

Funny article, anyhoo.

haha! i’m a call centre pig at ticketmaster – i’m also a millionaire obviously.

Omg, DYING. This article made me laugh like a crazy fool at work. 

This article is just wrong.  The venue decides on all fees charged to you.  Ticketmaster is simply hired/contracted by the venue to handle their ticketing needs.  Ticketfast, order processing, and service charges are instituted by the venue’s box office.  Your real gripe should be with your favorite concert venues not finding a way to have their own ticketing system and being too lazy contracting the job out to Ticketmaster.  Do some research.

ticketslaves serve their ticketmaster

I have yet to see a comment in Ticket Masters Defense that answers the question of why the pricing is so high and is dynamic. I would expect processing fees to be a flat fee regardless of ticket price, and the fact that a ticket master service fee can be 50% the cost of a tickets face value is absurd. I bought tickets for Cochella and the fees were around $75 per ticket, which is extremely high for an automated web service. No one is against a company making money for providing a service, but there is a difference between gouging users because there is no other reasonable option and charging a reasonable fee for the service you are providing. TM merging with Live Nation created a monopoly in the live entertainment industry, and I wish that the federal government would step in and do something about it.

Just go to stubhub!

As long as the money is going to Dinosaur petting zoo, then it is all OK!.

[...] (We’ve all been livid about the “order processing fee” tacked on by Ticketmaster but what is it actually used for? As seen on the Thought Catalog. [...]

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The only thing that is missing here is hovercrafts that they use to play tag with.