Posted on Wednesday, 6th August 2008 by Launching Today
Name
What do they do?
TicketStumbler is a comparison search interface for buying sporting event tickets across many different online retailers.
What are they like?
They compete with every other ticketing retailer, like Stubhub and Ticketmaster, however they do have the leg up in that they are showing the results for all of them in one screen, where you can just pick the cheapest one.
What else should they do?
While price comparison is always a good thing, finding the cheapest ticket to a sporting event isn’t necessarily the most important thing. The main thing is where the seat is. There aren’t any seating maps on TicketStumbler, they only tell you what area the seat is in. This pretty much turns me straight off the service. I have only ever bought sports tickets from Stubhub, and for me, the map with mousover prices was the most important thing, period.
How they can fail
They are in a very competitive market with a not so solid product. I will give it a go next time I buy sports tickets, but I am 99% sure that without a nice big seating map showing me where that seat is, I will be moving to the next place, quickly. Secondly, some of the retailers I have not heard of. I probably wouldn’t order from them without knowing anything about them and I’m not so sure other people would either. Perhaps highlighting some kind of accreditation for the third party online ticket retailers? This will give buyers some confidence.
Final word
Good concept, the price comparison works very well, and I am seeing some very cheap prices. Great business model, taking a cut from every ticket sale made. I’m afraid that I just don’t see TicketStumbler succeeding.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (3)
August 7th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Hi,
I’m Tom, the Co-Founder at TicketStumbler. I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for the candid review and clarify a couple points:
1) Some reconfiguration required that we re-associate all the venue maps with their locations. Since this is a time-consuming manual process, we launched without them, which we’ve taken some flack for. However, maps will be restored by the end of today or, at the latest, tomorrow.
2) As for ticket provider information, there is a link on every page titled “Provider Profiles” which contains links to pages we have setup with contact information and briefs on each provider. We are discussing ways to both improve these pages and integrate them more with the process so you can find out all you need to know about a provider prior to using them. Finally, we only show tickets from providers that offer buyer guarantees and other such methods to protect you when using them.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Hello Tom, thanks for the clarification. Once the maps are up and running I will add a note to the post.
As for the provider profiles, I have had a look at them an it does give me much more confidence in buying from unknown retailers. As you mention, it will certainly be a big help to integrate them more into the process, as I failed to notice them when using the website.
Thanks, and best of luck with the launch.
August 9th, 2008 at 9:51 am
tada maps are up (we’re still working out a few kinks, but you’ll get the idea):
http://ticketstumbler.com/boston-red-sox/2008-8-14/texas-rangers-at-boston-red-sox/
thanks again for the link.