Tickets.com and RazorGator: Blurring the Lines Between Primary and Secondary

By Alfred Branch, Jr.
TicketNews.com

Building on their current revenue sharing arrangement, RazorGator and Major League Baseball’s Tickets.com are using the Tickets.com customer database to promote events where Tickets.com is not the primary seller.

Last week, Tickets.com emailed some of its customers a RazorGator newsletter promoting the upcoming Dave Matthews Band tour. Tickets.com is not the primary ticket seller, but RazorGator is offering premium and other seats to the tour as a secondary seller.

The move marks the first time two major primary and secondary ticketing companies have worked together as such, and points to a new shift in the relationships between the two camps that have long been rivals. By authorizing a secondary seller to deal extra tickets, or in this case generate some ticket revenue from a tour where it’s not the primary seller, Tickets.com and others can distance themselves from the secondary market in the public’s eyes while still controlling a percentage of the resale market.

Neither Tickets.com nor RazorGator returned messages seeking comment. . .

Ed Gow, director of operations for TicketsWest.com, said he was familiar with the Tickets.com’s new practice, but that it could be considered a touchy subject to some. “We currently don’t do that, but it’s something that we’re having a lot of conversations about,” he said, adding that Ticketmaster is already doing something similar.

TicketsWest recently partnered with Paciolan Inc., providers of venue ticketing software, to build its new ticketing application platform for all of its venues and clients. According to Gow, built into the system is a marketplace feature that could help TicketsWest should it decide to work with secondary brokers.

“It could be something we might move into in the future,” Gow said.

Donald Vaccaro, president of Ticket Network, said the primary ticket sellers are singing a different tune now that more states have legalized scalping. “Primary ticket sellers are finding out that it’s more profitable to outsource secondary marketing sales then do it internally.”

Expect to see more such agreements in the near future, according to Vaccaro.

“We’ve seen tremendous growth in our private label web division for sites that want the preponderance of the intermediation and the ability to have control over the customer experience,” he said. “The consensus is that Venues, Teams and Primary Ticketers are moving toward outsourcing everything connected to secondary ticketing.”