Ticketmaster Will Sell Tickets Directly on Facebook by the end of April

With the fact that Facebook has easily become the world’s largest social media site, it makes perfect sense that people find events and keep track of events through the website. You can check up on what you’re friends are going to, what they aren’t going to, what events are coming up, and pretty much any other bit of information that you could want to find! As more and more people become aware of this more and more people want to join forces with Facebook in an attempt to help their businesses. Ticketmaster is the newest of these other companies to do so and they are saying by the end of April you will see direct links on Facebook that will allow you to purchases tickets for events you want to attend!

Ticketmaster is going to be joining the model of many businesses who have chosen to host core services within Facebook. The majority of these companies, online commerce enterprises and web publishers, have decided to go direct through Facebook after seeing statistics of how much customers spend on their websites versus more on mobile apps like Facebook, which is usually the most trafficked destination. After all, 84% of all time spent on non-native apps on mobile devices is within only five apps.

Through their contract, Facebook will be collecting a small percentage of each ticket sale when purchased through Facebook. Even though the purchase will be hosted on the social media site, tickets still must be “claimed” via Ticketmaster’s app or site. The buy-on-Facebook feature will initially be limited to a select number of general-admission events, but pending the success of the initial phase, purchasing options may be expanded in the future.

Dan Armstrong, VP and GM of distributed commerce at Ticketmaster, told BuzzFeed News in an interview that “by putting the ability to buy tickets directly within Facebook we hope that we’re going to provide a more seamless purchase experience and sell more tickets.” Facebook Messenger users already have the ability to purchase tickets through the experimental virtual assistant M, and have images of the ticket sent on request before the event. Adding Ticketmaster support to the feature, or a standalone Ticketmaster chat account may seem like the obvious next step, but Facebook’s Product Partnerships team’s Jon Park says no such plans are in the works. “I think it’s something that we’d be interested in exploring,” he continued, but Facebook hasn’t indicated at this point the likelihood of such a development.