Ticketmaster Sucks
In so so so so so many ways. Before my anger cools, I’d like to go through my most recent purchase: 2 tickets to see Big Boi at The Regency Ballroom, on the 23rd.
- Step 1: determine if there are, in fact, tickets available. Can’t tell from this screen. I know you can’t tell because I *also* tried to purchase Arcade Fire tickets from them a few weeks ago, but they were sold out. Even though there were no tickets to be found, the look and text on this first screen did not change.
- Step 1a: try to find tickets. Select 2 tickets, any price. You’re taken to another page. Surprise! Captcha! Why wasn’t this on the earlier page? No idea.
- Step 2: There are tickets. But how many are left? Can I wait a few hours to buy these? Did I get the last tickets? These are all things I’d like to know. Not only does Ticketmaster not give you any sort of helpful information, but the timer counting down in realtime at the bottom of the page induces stress like few other devices I’ve found on the internet. I understand the rationale for the timer (kind of) but there must be better ways (see bottom of this post). Oh, and if the timer accidentally expires, you have to start at the beginning. New time-wasting CAPTCHA screen.
- Step 3: FEES.
Let’s go through these.- Two tickets at $31 each equals $62. This is the advertised price of the concert.
- Oh, there’s a “Facility Charge”… what the hell is that, doesn’t matter, it’s only $4 and I want these tickets.
- Convenience Charge? $9 for each ticket? That sucks.
- Order Processing Fee: $5.65 - I’m being bled to death from papercuts.
- TicketFast Delivery: $2.50. Let me just say whoever came up with these names is one creative dude. By the way, TicketFast Delivery means that Ticketmaster will email your tickets to you. So that you can print them on your printer with your paper and your ink.
- Step 4: Billing. I didn’t see my credit card number in the list of “remembered numbers” Ticketmaster kept on my account. So I clicked the ‘Add new card’ link. Rather than have some sort of nice Javascript to open a previously-hidden form on the page, Ticketmaster takes me to - you guessed it - a new screen. My list of previously remembered credit cards is gone. This is important, because, as it turns out, I had already added my credit card number to my account. I didn’t see it earlier, but upon filling out this time-consuming form (Time left to complete this page: 1:12), Ticketmaster informs me that the credit card was already added to my account, and to please try again. Can I go back to the earlier list of cards? No. Can I use this particular credit card anyway? No, because Ticketmaster wants me to put in a new one. Reluctantly, I hit the tiny “Cancel order ” link at the bottom of the page. Alternately, I could have waited another 48 seconds and it would have been a moot point.
Time to start again. - Step 4a: Billing Part II. Once I finally made it through again, and selected the proper credit card, TicketMaster informed me that For My Security it was going to need my MasterCard SecureCode.
On a side note: camelCase is for programming, where these constraints are real. When half the words in your sentence are in camelCase, you know something somewhere has gone miserably wrong.
What is a MasterCard SecureCode? It’s like a password for your credit card. So you put in your credit card information (16-digit number. Expiration Date. 3-Digit Security Code on the back. Billing Name. Billing Address. Billing phone number.) - then you wait for that to go through, and you’re prompted for your password. Thankfully, this isn’t used by any site on the internet except for Ticketmaster. Which means I don’t know my SecureCode. Luckily you can reset it through a pleasant time-consuming process involving pieces of information which you’ve already given to the site (like the 3-digit security code on the back of the credit card) along with personal information like your date of birth. Ugh.
Oh, and the icing on this SecureCake is that it’s totally optional. Like I said, I haven’t run across another site which uses it. Yet, curiously, my credit card works on those sites. So the SecureCode doesn’t make your credit card any safer by itself. MasterCard says it’s “just like entering a PIN at the ATM”. The difference is that all ATMs require PINs. The only way this could be more useless is if, after you put in your information, the store asked you if you wanted to optionally put in your SecureCode. - Step 5: User Experience Survey! To make me feel a little bit better, there was a link to a survey at the end of my “purchase experience”. I intended to give them a piece of my mind, and maybe things would improve in some distant future. Observe the fruit of my efforts.
I know the comment can only be 255 characters because as I started typing a helpful, detailed comment, a little red error message appeared at the top of the page. So I rewrote my comment, and then Javascript threw up, as you can see.
