First a quick story from one of the brokers:
“A few weeks ago you mentioned the Big Game Pack from the Oakland A’s. I bought that the next day. Last week the tickets cam in. I did not price them too high because I wanted to be sure they sold. Well they started selling. The Home Opener and Yankees tickets went real quick. So did one of the Red Sox games. I raised the prices on the rest of the Bigger of the big games since most of them are sorta far off. Between this and a few concerts I have done already, I have made a tidy sum.”
Monday is opening day. Expect a lot of baseball activity for the next 14 days. This is a very busy period for that. Remember to consign your tickets if you have a batch of them. Also keep in mind after the first 10 – 12 days of the baseball season, expect a bit of a slowdown for just over a week. (approx 4/12 – 4/23) This happens every year and should be expected. Activity will resume normal “in-season” activity after that. This is also a good time to remind everyone that we do not make a profit on every MLB game. When the Pirates or Devil Rays come to town for a Tuesday game, you want to price those to move and recover what you can. We make our money on the weekend games and the “big games” to cover those.
Next week we are going to have some analysis on early MLB ticket sales.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Consignments
If you are brokering Major League Baseball tickets, you are probably getting your season tickets this week. Ours have been coming in. This is actually one of busiest times of the year. Not just because MLB sales are picking up, but we have to ship out all of the early sales. Yesterday, for example, we packaged 43 envelopes. It can be time consuming just to tear the tickets apart, make sure you have the right section, the right number of seats, the right shipping label and double checking it all. I will be very happy when I get everything consigned.
I have been asked a couple of times how we deal with the juggling of tickets coming in, fulfilling early sales and consigning. Keep in mind we primarily are selling MLB tickets through Stubhub.
We keep good records of everything that has been sold. I have all of my sale confirmation emails in folders by team. Stubhub’s online system allows you to see all of your transactions waiting shipments on a team by team basis. When we get our tickets for a specific team, we print out all the transactions, generate the shipping labels from Stubhub, double check and start stuffing Fedex envelopes.
We could immediately consign them and let the Stubhub field offices send them out, but doing it ourselves gets the money in our account a week earlier. For us that means several thousand dollars.
As soon as we ship all of the early sales, we immediately Fedex the packages to the appropriate field office. As much as we can, we try to send other tickets in the Fedex packages to save on shipping cost. From this point on all we do is forward out sales confirmation emails to the field offices. Very easy. I will let Stubhub burn through their own printer cartridges.
It is a pain to go through this period, but this is only for about two weeks a year. The rest is click, click, click.
We have had a lot of baseball topics recently. Don’t worry, we have several other topics coming on the horizon. It is a busy time of year for baseball so we need to focus on it for now.
To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com
I have been asked a couple of times how we deal with the juggling of tickets coming in, fulfilling early sales and consigning. Keep in mind we primarily are selling MLB tickets through Stubhub.
We keep good records of everything that has been sold. I have all of my sale confirmation emails in folders by team. Stubhub’s online system allows you to see all of your transactions waiting shipments on a team by team basis. When we get our tickets for a specific team, we print out all the transactions, generate the shipping labels from Stubhub, double check and start stuffing Fedex envelopes.
We could immediately consign them and let the Stubhub field offices send them out, but doing it ourselves gets the money in our account a week earlier. For us that means several thousand dollars.
As soon as we ship all of the early sales, we immediately Fedex the packages to the appropriate field office. As much as we can, we try to send other tickets in the Fedex packages to save on shipping cost. From this point on all we do is forward out sales confirmation emails to the field offices. Very easy. I will let Stubhub burn through their own printer cartridges.
It is a pain to go through this period, but this is only for about two weeks a year. The rest is click, click, click.
We have had a lot of baseball topics recently. Don’t worry, we have several other topics coming on the horizon. It is a busy time of year for baseball so we need to focus on it for now.
To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
A Good Day
While not every day is like this, we enjoy when it happens.
One theme you repeatedly hear from us in the book and this subscription is that you must list your tickets early. There are several reasons for this:
• Less competition - Most tickets are not listed till the last few weeks before the event.
• Higher prices - People are willing to pay more for the guarantee they get the seats they want.
• Hype – with every event, whether it is a concert or sporting event, there is a lot of early hype. People responding to the hype are likely to pay higher prices.
• Cash Flow – Money in your pocket today is better than money in your pocket tomorrow.
Back to our good day. Just with MLB, we sold 54 tickets that day. This was across 14 transactions. Our cost of goods sold was $1874 and our revenue (minus service fees) was $3287. This was a profit of $1413. That is a return of 75% return on those goods.
While this is a good volume of ticket for a whole day, this day actually brought our return for MLB for pre-season sales. Our early sales are running about a 90% profit margin so far.
Now we are not going to keep these types of returns all season long. Included in our sales are many opening day tickets, Saturday games, interleague games and other big events. These always get higher prices. There are going to be some Tuesday games against the Devil Rays or the Pirates that are going to go unsold. There are going to be many games that we take a loss or break even. The more we sell early and the better returns we get, we offset those less profitable events. When it is all said and done we expect to realize a profit margin of 25% – 30%.
Not everything is a home run. We need to put ourselves into a position of realizing the maximum returns where we can and minimize the losses in other places. In the end the higher returns win.
To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com
One theme you repeatedly hear from us in the book and this subscription is that you must list your tickets early. There are several reasons for this:
• Less competition - Most tickets are not listed till the last few weeks before the event.
• Higher prices - People are willing to pay more for the guarantee they get the seats they want.
• Hype – with every event, whether it is a concert or sporting event, there is a lot of early hype. People responding to the hype are likely to pay higher prices.
• Cash Flow – Money in your pocket today is better than money in your pocket tomorrow.
Back to our good day. Just with MLB, we sold 54 tickets that day. This was across 14 transactions. Our cost of goods sold was $1874 and our revenue (minus service fees) was $3287. This was a profit of $1413. That is a return of 75% return on those goods.
While this is a good volume of ticket for a whole day, this day actually brought our return for MLB for pre-season sales. Our early sales are running about a 90% profit margin so far.
Now we are not going to keep these types of returns all season long. Included in our sales are many opening day tickets, Saturday games, interleague games and other big events. These always get higher prices. There are going to be some Tuesday games against the Devil Rays or the Pirates that are going to go unsold. There are going to be many games that we take a loss or break even. The more we sell early and the better returns we get, we offset those less profitable events. When it is all said and done we expect to realize a profit margin of 25% – 30%.
Not everything is a home run. We need to put ourselves into a position of realizing the maximum returns where we can and minimize the losses in other places. In the end the higher returns win.
To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
I Love 80s Rock
We have been getting a lot of stories from people about some of the deals they have been making with The Police tickets. This has been by far the hottest ticket going on. They have been adding shows left and right to fill the demand. On our top 250 we show the activity from the last month. When I broke it out by the last week, the police have surpassed Wicked. That is really saying something.
As if the Police were not enough, Genesis has announced tour dates. Here is what has been announced so far
09/07 Toronto BMO Field Canada
09/11 Boston TD Banknorth Garden Arena
09/14 Montreal Stade Olympique Canada
09/16 Hartford Civic Center
09/18 Philadelphia Wachovia Center
09/22 Columbus Nationwide Arena
09/23 Washington Verizon Center
09/27 East Rutherford Giants Stadium
09/29 Cleveland Quicken Loans Arena
09/30 Detroit Palace of Auburn Hills
10/02 Chicago United Center
10/09 San Jose HP Pavilion
10/12 Los Angeles Hollywood Bowl
Not all of these dates have ticket sale dates announced yet. See below for the ones that do. We expect Genesis to be as popular a tour as the Police.
Good Deal
The Oakland A’s have announced a very unique ticket package, that we absolutely love. It is called the Big Game Pack. You get tickets to all the big selling games.
Opponent Games
White Sox (Home Opener) 1
Yankees 3
Red Sox 4
Giants (Interleague) 3
Cardinals (Interleague & WS Champs) 3
Tigers 3
Angels (last home series) 3
Fireworks Night 3
Many of you will recall that these are the games that give us the best returns of the year. Buying tickets directly from the team bypasses all of those nasty service fees that we incur when we go through ticket master.
If you are thinking about doing some baseball, and we recommend it, this is a great opportunity to do so.
To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com
As if the Police were not enough, Genesis has announced tour dates. Here is what has been announced so far
09/07 Toronto BMO Field Canada
09/11 Boston TD Banknorth Garden Arena
09/14 Montreal Stade Olympique Canada
09/16 Hartford Civic Center
09/18 Philadelphia Wachovia Center
09/22 Columbus Nationwide Arena
09/23 Washington Verizon Center
09/27 East Rutherford Giants Stadium
09/29 Cleveland Quicken Loans Arena
09/30 Detroit Palace of Auburn Hills
10/02 Chicago United Center
10/09 San Jose HP Pavilion
10/12 Los Angeles Hollywood Bowl
Not all of these dates have ticket sale dates announced yet. See below for the ones that do. We expect Genesis to be as popular a tour as the Police.
Good Deal
The Oakland A’s have announced a very unique ticket package, that we absolutely love. It is called the Big Game Pack. You get tickets to all the big selling games.
Opponent Games
White Sox (Home Opener) 1
Yankees 3
Red Sox 4
Giants (Interleague) 3
Cardinals (Interleague & WS Champs) 3
Tigers 3
Angels (last home series) 3
Fireworks Night 3
Many of you will recall that these are the games that give us the best returns of the year. Buying tickets directly from the team bypasses all of those nasty service fees that we incur when we go through ticket master.
If you are thinking about doing some baseball, and we recommend it, this is a great opportunity to do so.
To learn how to make money being a ticket broker, visit www.MyTicketBiz.com
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