StubHub announced a pair of new features on its ticket resale platform – allowing sellers to let the company take the reins on pricing tickets they want to sell there, or in some instances – sell the tickets to StubHub directly. Pricing Assistant and Sell it Now were announced in a press release from the company on Wednesday, touted as “best-in-class” seller tools being rolled out across North America.
Pricing Assistant is an optional toggle that allows individuals to let company algorithm’s adjust the price on tickets listed for sale on the marketplace – moving prices up or down as the market adjusts and event dates draw closer. Sell It Now operates as a pop-up window that displays to the seller when listing tickets, giving an immediate offer for what they’re selling, which would then be owned and sold by StubHub itself on its marketplace.
“By adding Pricing Assistant and Sell It Now to our range of seller tools, StubHub now offers an option for any fan who wants to sell their ticket,” said Neal McSherry, Group Product Manager at StubHub. “With the wealth of data that informs these tools, they’re the sharpest in the industry, and will only get smarter as we add more and more event history to our data repository.”
The pricing assistant tool is a logical extension of the existing price recommendation engine that StubHub has offered for some time – giving both a recommended specific posting price and a high and low end of the range that they assume tickets might sell based on internal data and historical performance information.
Sell it now is a much more novel concept, introducing a slight blurring of the line between StubHub as the marketplace where ticket buyers and resellers can safely transact their business and StubHub as the holder of ticket inventory for events on its marketplace.
“We see this as the beginnings of a new market,” StubHub head of product Todd Northcutt told CNET, which also indicated that the feature is currently available for a handful of NFL games each week. “Our goal is to try to make it as easy as possible for consumers to sell their tickets.”
He told CNET that the program isn’t designed to scoop tickets at low prices and turn a large profit, but rather a way of strengthening its place as a go-to destination for anyone looking for the largest selection of tickets to the largest number of events. In a crowded resale market with competitors including TicketNetwork, Vivid Seats, SeatGeek, and primary/secondary hybrids like Ticketmaster and AXS, the new tools are designed to help the eBay-owned company keep its edge in the marketplace.
Pricing assistant has been slowly rolled out since April, while the sell it now feature is new.
