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Comment by morley | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes Ticketmaster takes a long while to print the tickets. So even if the seller has to send in the tickets as soon as possible (which is in fact the case), there's going to be some period where the transaction has occurred and the seller can't possibly send the tickets to the buyer.

I think Stubhub has non-delivery penalties, but probably not enough to cancel out this windfall.

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Sure, "some period" is fine. When you buy stuff on eBay, for example, your product might not even ship for a couple of days.

In this case, though, it was a month later and they still hadn't been delivered. That's no longer reasonable.

It's possible the ticket issuers won't issue tickets even in that timeframe. StubHub's web site has warnings that the tickets might not be available until 72 hours before the event. In which case they either need to forbid reselling such tickets, or have massive penalties for breaking the contract.

For Lakers games and season ticket holders, TicketMaster doesn't 'e-print' the ticket until 96 hours before tip off, to try to minimize ticket resale (which it doesn't, or only marginally, because they're counting on people not being able to keep track of that - which StubHub helpfully does).

The 49ers did that this season (72 hours)... one of many ways they pissed off the season ticket base.

Age old problem. It is why PayPal exists. Arbitrage on transactions where trust is a problem. SH could warranty to make a comparable ticket available on any consummated transaction - probably they should given the reputational loss they've incurred.

They currently guarantee "comparable replacement tickets or send you a refund." It sounds like in practice they try for the "comparable replacement tickets" first... except that according to them there were none in this case, because all the remaining tickets were really expensive!

Eesh. Comparable replacement tickets refers to a similar seat at the same event - price really isn't a factor. Nice piece of acrobatics on their lawyer's part tho.

Yeah, sometimes you just have to sit back and be impressed, even if it's ridiculous.

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