When college students decide not to go to sporting events, many try to sell their tickets on platforms such as Snapchat, GroupMe or Facebook. SeatStock, an up-and-coming ticket site for college students, is seeking to make the process of student section ticket resales safer for buyers and sellers.
SeatStock founders Brady Stein and Josh Cohen came up with the idea for the website in their freshman year of college at the University of Iowa. Now in their junior year, the two have found significant success at their own college as well as Ole Miss and 56 other colleges throughout the country.
“(Ole Miss and the University of Iowa) are our biggest two markets so far. But other than that, the universities have all said they don’t mind us doing this unless they don’t allow secondary resale,” Stein said. “Ole Miss is one of our favorite spots.”
Stein and Cohen’s motivation for starting the company came when they were scammed trying to sell tickets. In Stein’s freshman year, he sold his Iowa vs Iowa State ticket valued at $150 on Facebook; however, he never received a Venmo payment for his ticket.
“A lot of kids either don’t know where to sell (tickets) or just don’t trust where they sell,” Stein said. “If you were to sell them on the Snapchat story or someone outside your network, outside of your fraternity or one of your friends, you’re dealing with people who might not Venmo or Zelle you on the other side.”
UM Vice Chancellor for Intercollegiate Athletics Keith Carter is happy with the additional layer of security SeatStock provides.
“As we’ve gone into the digital world of ticketing, there are a lot more ways for nefarious things to happen in the ticketing world. So we want to make sure that tickets are secure,” Carter said in an interview with The Daily Mississippian. “We want to make sure that those are valid and they’re not getting scammed and those types of things. So I think any measures we can put in place to do that have been good.”
UM students have been concerned about ticket scams.
“I was really nervous about getting scammed, especially with the high ticket prices this season because of the lack of student tickets,” Susan Larue, a psychology major from Newport Beach, Calif., said. “I had to ask the people I got tickets from for their student ID to make sure it was real, and I had to FaceTime some of them to make sure they were real.”
SeatStock is auction based. To purchase a ticket, users can place bids on tickets for a game and the highest bidder will secure the ticket.
SeatStock only sells tickets for student sections and only students have the option of selling or buying their tickets on SeatStock. Buyers and sellers must have an “edu” domain email to verify that they are a student. To ensure ticket safety, SeatStock also does not send the seller the payout until they know the buyer has the ticket.
“(There are) about 8,000 to 12,000 seats, sometimes even more, at every stadium that are just for students. And there isn’t really a dedicated marketplace for this. So that’s why we started SeatStock,” Stein said.
As of Jan. 29, tickets for the USC at Iowa women’s basketball game on Feb. 2 are going for as low as $65 on the site. The company is considering making tickets cheaper by promoting coupon codes.
“Typically the tickets are like $40 to $80. Some SEC schools are more. Some Big 10 ones are lower. It just depends on the school,” Stein said.
SeatStock’s staff has expanded to four people, and they now have a system in place for customer service. A chatbot, powered by Intercom, will facilitate direct contact with one of the four company members.
“This was really big in our early stages, because obviously when you first get something on the market, there’s a lot of customer support and there are issues, but we were always making sure the customer’s happier when they leave rather than when they first get there,” Stein said. “And sometimes we’ll even give them a coupon code, refunds of course and everything that the customer needs.”
