Friday, December 14, 2007

Leetch Night Ticket Auction UPDATE

I went to the Ticketmaster website and found this regarding their online auctions...

"Ticketmaster Auctions are unlike other online auction sites that allow consumers to directly or indirectly sell their tickets. Our auctions allow our venues, promoters, and artists to sell tickets directly to fans-thereby letting the fans set the value for live entertainment. The main difference with Ticketmaster Auctions is there can be multiple winners within the same auction. However, you are NOT bidding for tickets to a particular seat, row or section. Instead, you are only bidding for tickets to see the show in a seat that will later be determined by comparing your bid with other bids that are submitted before the auction ends.

Specifically, the tickets within an auction have been ranked according to what the event providers or Ticketmaster have determined in their subjective discretion to be from greater to lesser desirability. At the end of the auction, tickets will be assigned to winning bidders based on those rankings so that those who bid higher than you will be assigned higher ranked seats and those who bid lower than you will be assigned lower ranked seats, with ties broken in favor of those who submit their final bid earlier than other bids.

Please note that while many other online auction sites employ "Proxy Bidding," we do not. "Proxy Bidding" is when you submit a confidential maximum bid and the auction system automatically increases your bid in order to maintain the high bid. The proxy bidding system stops when it has won the auction or has reached the maximum bid amount you specified-therefore your maximum bid may or may not be the price you actually pay once the auction ends. Ticketmaster Auctions do not employ Proxy Bidding because there can be multiple winners within the same auction and exact seat location assignments are determined by comparing your bid against other bids submitted.

It is important for bidders to understand that, in Ticketmaster Auctions, the bid amount they enter will be the actual amount to be paid per ticket if the bid is a winning bid at the end of the auction. The one exception to this rule would be for Uniform Payment Auctions* where the per-ticket price is equal to the lowest winning bid in your ticket group at the close of the auction.

* A Uniform Payment Auction will be clearly labeled. If you do not see the words 'This is a Uniform Payment Auction' on the auction page, then the auction is not a Uniform Payment Auction."

...looks like this is legit, but I still don't think the Rangers should be promoting this on their official website. If they wanted to do their fans a favor, they should have raffled tickets off instead of promoting an auction.

...I know this isn't a big deal and you'd rather be reading about Drury possibly centering the first line or Malik being traded to a team in Siberia, but the Rangers don't play until Sunday so there isn't much going on.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Really interesting way of selling the tickets in an auction system. It seems to be very difficult in bidding to buy a ticket for higher ranked seat. The blog has given a clear explanation of the proxy bidding, which helps the users like me in bidding.