Recouped Some Of My Money -- That's A ... Good Thing?

I am going to the United States Women's Soccer Team's Friendly against China (formally referred to as "China PR") at Allianz Field this/Saturday afternoon.  I bought a ticket several weeks ago, not thinking that my friend, who has two Major League Soccer season tickets (at least) and who frequently allows me to sit next to her because that second ticket of hers often goes unused, bought tickets to this Match.  Then I thought that, well, this is the best country-based women's soccer side on Earth, so someone would want to go to this Game with her, but my friend said no one did.  And since she bought better seats than I did (mine was in the upper deck, and I would get the brunt of the Sun throughout the Match), when she offered the seat next to her, I said hell yeah.

But that meant I needed to sell the ticket I bought.  That was an adventure in and of itself.  I thought I could just go to any scalper site and put it up.  But since I bought it through Ticketmaster, I had to sell it through Ticketmaster.  And that ain't so simple, either.  I had no way of, I guess, pre-transferring it so the ticket automatically gets electronically given to the buyer, which was weird to me.  So I had to do some digging and I then found out that United States Soccer has its own, uh, mini-site within which it can control the tickets USWNT Games are sold for and to.  If I didn't know this mini-site even existed, I would not have been able to sell my ticket.

It gets a even more complicated than that.  I decided to initially sell my ticket at a price where I would recoup the amount for which I bought it.  Because this site (and, ostensibly, U. S. Soccer) gets a cut, I had to set the price for a little ... no, a bit more than I bought it for.  That would make the price higher than the other prices I saw tickets being sold for on SeatGeek and StubHub, so I thought there was a good chance I would have to lower my price if I wanted to sell it.  However, USWNT had an option whereby I could automatically sell it back to them, no questions asked, at a price they set.  That would have helped make it easy to get rid of the ticket, and I had to get rid of this ticket because I knew I wasn't going to use it.  But I gave myself until Thursday night; if the ticket I had didn't sell at a price I eventually settled on, I would take U. S. Soccer up on their offer ... assuming they were still extending that offer by the time I settled for it.

Tuesday night it still didn't sell, so I bit the bullet and lowered the price so that, after fees and cuts, I would be losing money.  It still didn't sell as of Wednesday evening, so I lowered it so that the sell price was the lowest price I saw on the scalper sites, but only by a buck.  I was ready to give in, but on Thursday night I looked at the mini-site and, lo and behold, it did sell, thank goodness.

I will be honest: I paid about $73 total for the ticket.  U. S. Soccer told me it sold for about $56, which is strange, because I set the last price around $61.  Either they are telling me the amount of money I am going to get back and they already are accounting for their cut, or, and this is another thing at least USWNT does, I mistakenly opted for "dynamic pricing," whereby you let the mini-site set the price and allow them to raise or lower it depending on whether other tickets are selling or not selling.  I know I didn't set the price for $56, which, if I were more enterprising, I would follow up on.  But, for now, I note that their take-it-or-leave-it offer was for about $34.  If I had taken them up on it, I would have absorbed about a $39 loss.  Since I stuck to my guns (I guess), I took a $17 hit, but I got $22 more than I would have if I just gave in to USWNT.  So ... that's a ... good thing ... ?