Two of the leading secondary ticket exchanges are teaming up to better serve customers and make listing ticket inventory easier for brokers.

TicketNetwork and Live Nation’s TicketsNow this week announced the signing of a data sharing agreement that will allow for real-time exchanging of ticket inventory information. The two competing companies have worked together in the past, but this deal is the most significant collaboration they have ever forged. Officials with both companies worked on the arrangement for months, including extensive software development and testing of the compatibility of both systems.

“TicketsNow and TicketNetwork both came to the conclusion that consumers seeing inventory in real-time and transactions occurring on certified PCI compliant Point Of Sale systems was paramount to consumer satisfaction,” Don Vaccaro, founder and CEO of TicketNetwork, said in a statement. A spokesperson for TicketsNow did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

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The two companies have sold their own Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant point-of-sale software programs to ticket brokers for years, but the deal comes at an important time for both, marking a new sense of cooperation as competition in the secondary ticket market continues to grow.

Ticket brokers who upload their inventory to the two exchanges now will be able to do so faster and easier. The companies said the process will be effortless — and take place in real-time — because creating separate export files and uploading them to each respective exchange on a scheduled basis no longer will be necessary. Such work now will be synchronized automatically.

With real-time, dual uploading, not only will brokers save time, but consumers on both exchanges will see “the most current and complete ticket information available” on either exchange, which will make their purchases easier.

“We’re excited about this agreement with TicketsNow,” Matt Moran, vice president of operations for TicketNetwork, said in a statement. “We feel that this is the next step to providing a superior customer experience to buyers and sellers that use our Web sites and software.”

TicketNetwork is the parent company of TicketNews.

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