Movietickets.com vs. Fandango II |
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| After writing my post on Movietickets.com versus Fandango, I received an e-mail from a highly placed source. Why do I use the term highly placed source? Because I am too lazy to ask this person for permission to print his/her name or company, and I received the e-mail a ridiculously long time ago. Needless to say, this person's position rhymes with "rice president" and he/she works at one of the above companies. And I just think it's really cool to say I have a highly placed source | ||
"Just to set the record straight, neither Fandango or MovieTickets.com buys tickets at net and resells them. The only revenue is from the service fee and ad sales." |
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| I stand corrected. | ||
| I think that they can argue that they are like a wholesaler. Like an Expedia wholesaler, and not like a Ticketmaster wholesaler (as you can probably guess, I despise their online business model). If online sales are truly increasing, then it is more likely that they are capturing incremental business - i.e. people who would not see the movie if it wasn't online. They are feeding business towards the movie theaters, so they should get some kind of break. | ||
| The current service fee (in Orange County) for Fandango is $1, and the Movietickets.com is $1.50. Yes, this is a fee for convenience, but from a customer satisfaction perspective, no service fee is better. As I mentioned in the earlier posting, if you are an AMC Moviewatcher, you waive the fee on Movietickets.com. Fandango should do the same thing with the Regal Club. These two companies should generate revenue from ad sales, not at the expense of their consumers. | ||
| But in the end, I have no access to any sort of data, so my argument stems from how I would run the business. People pay enough for movie tickets as it is. Don't penalize them for buying something online. Make it cost the same, and they may be more inclined to visit the site and purchase tickets there. Heck, run a promotion and make tickets cheaper than the box office, to see if it causes more people to buy online (yeah, like AMC or Regal would ever let that happen). | ||
| Here's a final thought - now that both sites have established themselves, why not go a step further? Add features so that people will stay on the site longer. Fandango is a little better at this. They have an area where you can post a quick review of the film. Why not expand on this? Add a discussion board? Movietickets.com has podcasts and some links to buy posters. The easiest thing they could do - and what both sites aren't doing - is to put a link to the website of the movie, and add trailers. Then they can jack up their advertising rates. | ||
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