The Philadelphia 76ers may have trouble selling tickets to basketball games (even with tickets lower than the costs of beer), but that will not prevent them from attempting to be innovative with the way fans can purchase their tickets. The Sixers announced a new business partnership today that will make StubHub the new official ticketing partner of the NBA franchise and will introduce a new ticket platform for the 2016-2017 season designed to enhance the consumer experience.
What do the Sixers and StubHub have planned? For starters, all tickets available for any Sixers home game will now be found under one ticket marketplace, regardless if they are primary tickets sold directly from the Sixers or from the secondary market that StubHub is known for. That offers a convenient place to find the best deals on tickets at a Sixers home game any time LeBron James comes to town. The new marketplace will also have information available to the consumer such as the real-time market rate for a ticket and an improved search feature allowing fans to break down available seats by different search criteria and amenities. From the sound of it, it seems as though the Sixers and StubHub are on to something.
“For over 15 years, StubHub has been a marketplace that connected buyers and sellers of tickets to live events on the secondary market, but now we are in a position to provide the industry a true end-to-end ticketing solution that combines our experience in e-commerce and secondary ticketing with a set of features that will help our partners sell more tickets,” StubHub president Scott Cutler said in a released statement. “This new platform signifies the evolution of our company and a revolution in the industry. And we could not be more excited that the Philadelphia 76ers are joining us as our inaugural partner.”
Fortunately for Sixers fans, this looks to be something that should be available and observed starting next season, rather than sitting around and waiting for the Sixers to put all the pieces together with the hope of having this new ticket marketplace system rolled out five or six years down the road, which appears to be the business plan for putting together a basketball roster ready to compete.
Sports franchises and ticket resellers have been teaming up more and more in recent years, which at times feels icky for the consumer, but this new approach may turn out to be a decent idea and could catch on elsewhere if it has not already. At the very least, if this helps StubHub from avoiding a controversial situation in which it takes tickets away from a consumer, then it is a positive step forward for everybody.
[Sixers]
