(Updated Jan 29, 2013)
Stubhub definitely outranks Ebay as far as selling tickets goes, but lets take a look at some pros and cons to help out the new brokers.
- It’s free to list your tickets. You only pay a fee when they sell so you can keep them up as long as you want.
- You won’t rack up a bunch of listing fees like your tickets don’t sell like you would on Ebay.
- Stubhub usually produces higher profits than Ebay if you price your tickets right and are patient.
- Shipping is a no-brainer. If your tickets sell, you receive a confirmation email and a link to print the label. Just slap the label and the tickets in a FedEx envelope, drop it off at a Fed-Ex drop off location and you’re done.
- No dealing with questions from buyers, unlike Craigslist and Ebay.
- Confidentiality – you never actually talk to the customer because Stubhub is the mediator. They use generic return addresses on the FedEx label so buyers can’t tell where they actually came from.
- It’s a lot faster to list your tickets as opposed to Ebay
- Stubhub has a large sellers program that you can qualify for if you have an average of 20 listings at a time. The nice thing about this program is you have access to a large sellers rep that can help you out with many things including historical data. The other benefit is that you get your sellers fees reduced from 15% to 12.5%.
- Last Minute Services allows you to list your tickets until a few hours before the event.
Cons
- Huge fees. They will take a 15% cut of each ticket you sell, so you have to incorporate this into your pricing strategy.
- Payment delay time – Stubhub will send you your money about a week after your tickets have arrived to the buyer.
- FedEx only shipping - which can be inconvenient if you live in a small town or aren’t close to a FedEx drop box.
- Your listings don’t stand out as they would on Ebay.
- Completed sales are only shown if you create a new listing, so it's not easy to tell how much tickets have sold for. (However there is a little trick to see completed sales in a certain section. Just create a fake listing and go through each step until the completed sales show up. It will show about the last 5 sales in that section. Once you've looked at them, make sure to cancel your listing though.)
