The best ticket web sites for buying third party tickets
Is there any difference between them?
If you are trying to go to a popular concert, you may find that the concert is sold out or doesn’t have the seats that you want from the almighty Ticketmaster. When this happens, you may want to purchase a ticket from another person who has listed their ticket for sale on a third party web site. When I went looking for tickets for Elton John on the day of the concert, I found that the following sites all appear to have the same inventory as StubHub. You can tell because if you watch the least expensive tickets on all of these sites and they all show exactly the same tickets as the cheapest. Here are some of the sites and what a single ticket would cost at the same time with fees.
StubHub.com $167
TickPick.com $160
Ticketsforless.com $173
TicketsCorner.net $161
VividSeats.com $161
They have systems that automatically submit tickets to all of the most popular ticket sites.
All providers were generally within $10 of each other, but within these providers Tickpick was providing the lowest cost for identical tickets. So, I would say that Tickpick would be the best. Tickpick also lists with all fees included. It is quite annoying that other sites force you to enter your billing information before they will show you their outrageous fees which averaged around $35 — what a rip off for just running a web site. If the fees are going to significantly inflate the price, then you better show them, we’re not that stupid.
You may also want to monitor Ticketmaster since they have an entirely different set of tickets than Stubhub. Lowest tickets at the time was $149 + $21 fees = $170.
For the Elton John concert, I did seat prices go into the $60 range 30 minutes before the concert and the Tickpick web version would allow you to buy tickets even after the concert had started, but the mobile version removed the show after it had started. There were still tickets showing even after it was over. Apparently there are a lot of ticket sellers who would rather get nothing than sell a cheap ticket. You can also put a “bid” in Tickpick if you have a price you have in mind that you would pay.
One place you probably don’t want to go to is Craigslist. There is no way to insure that if you send money to some unknown person by using some payment system like PayPal or cash app, that they will send you a link to transfer the tickets. If you want to try, they have to send you the email from Ticketmaster authorizing the transfer. If you can get them to do that first, then these should be legitimate tickets and is the only way to know if they actually have the tickets. Screenshots of tickets mean nothing as well as physical tickets that could be fakes. Only after receiving the transfer of the tickets in email should you send money. But I think nearly 100% of the sellers on Craigslist for low priced tickets are scams and they won’t do that. If anyone expects to sell a ticket on Craigslist, then they should expect that they have to send the tickets before payment. Otherwise any money you send WILL simply disappear.