Making money with MLB baseball tickets, changes in strategies

April 20th, 2007 by Kenric

The tickets I bought this year were sold in early March. I have still been selling tickets for my friends who have followed my previous post Making Money online with MLB Cubs tickets. Unlike me, they did not elect to sell all their tickets right away. After running a few last minute auctions I’ve come up with a few more tips which I’ll definitely implement into my strategy for next year.

Selling tickets a week or less before game day is risky due to weather. If the weather is known for gameday it will make or break you. Chicago has had cold weather and snow. The weather forecast for the weekend is 45 degress, cloudy and slight chance of rain. Who would be willing to pay even face value for a ballgame on that day? The flip side is that the weather could be great and everyone wants to go, but I don’t think it’s worth the risk.

Sell the tickets before the weather forecast is known or you might get burned!

I try to buy 6 side by side tickets for each game. Most people auction tickets in sets of 4 or 2. I auction my 6 tickets the same way. When somebody won the set of 4 tickets, they would usually want the next 2 tickets. However, with the ease of pumping out Ebay auctions in seconds, my auctions ended too close together. Therefore, the person who won the 4 tickets, didn’t have time to:

Realize that they won 4 tickets
Tell friends or find out if others wanted to go also
Get decisions from them
Try to bid on the other 2 tickets

This was a major mistake that I made. These 2 tickets next to their 4 are worth alot more to them than anyone else. They will bid much higher than anyone else.

Leave at least 10 minutes in between auctions on side by side tickets. Give the first winner time to bid on the second auction.

This year I had great success with Cubs vs. White Sox tickets and Cubs vs. St. Louis Cardinals. The other games, even though they were on weekends did not seem to move very well. I didn’t get any weekday games but I can’t imagine that they would have moved any better. Next year, I’m only going to purchase games against the White Sox, Yankees, Red Sox or Cardinals.

Stick to the premium games only. Demand for other games seemed to be down this year.

I haven’t had any complaints about the print at home tickets yet. About half of the winner bidders wanted actual paper tickets. I printed them at home but felt that they looked cheap and flimsy. So I went to Kinko’s and got them printed on thick card stock with a color laser printer for $1.10 each. These came out looking like real tickets. I added this cost to my shipping & handling charge.

Be prepared to spend a little money on print at home tickets.

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