E-Commerce: “Buy Now” Buttons Appear in Twitter Mobile App

One new feature suggests that Twitter may be experimenting with online shopping. “Buy Now” buttons began appearing in the mobile app this week in tweets from Fancy, an online retailer. The buttons previously took users to a checkout page, but the function is no longer active. If the function is restored, it will be the first time that Twitter allows users to pay for products from a tweet. Twitter has been expanding its e-commerce capabilities since the company went public. Continue reading E-Commerce: “Buy Now” Buttons Appear in Twitter Mobile App

Twitter Hires Commerce Chief, Plans to Offer Shopping Tools

As part of its move into the online shopping space currently dominated by Amazon and eBay, Twitter has hired Nathan Hubbard as the company’s first head of commerce. Hubbard was president of Live Nation Entertainment’s Ticketmaster until earlier this month. Twitter plans to initially enter e-commerce by offering retailers tools for selling goods and services inside tweets. Forrester projects e-commerce will be a $370 billion market in the U.S. by 2017. Continue reading Twitter Hires Commerce Chief, Plans to Offer Shopping Tools

Live Nation and Ticketmaster Invite Resellers to New System

Live Nation Entertainment and its Ticketmaster subsidiary will now offer tickets to be sold by resellers via its new TM+ feature. In order for the new platform to succeed, Live Nation and Ticketmaster must convince resellers, rather than competitors, to use it. The two companies have been looking to boost their role in the $4 billion per year concert ticket reselling market, currently dominated by scalpers and brokers that buy tickets at face value, then resell them for a profit on sites such as eBay’s StubHub.com. Continue reading Live Nation and Ticketmaster Invite Resellers to New System

AEG Launches New AXS Ticket Service: Competition for Ticketmaster?

  • Since Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation last year, the Justice Department mandated that Ticketmaster share its software to avoid creating a monopoly.
  • As a result, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) has launched AXS, a ticket service that “lets you buy tickets at the theater’s or arena’s own website rather than linking you to a ticket website, like Ticketmaster. And it shows all the fees upfront,” as explained in a Marketplace radio report.
  • “They’re not going to charge the much-hated ‘print-at-home’ fee, that no one could ever really understand why that fee was even there in the first place,” says Gary Bongiovanni of the concert trade magazine Pollstar. “And then that is part of what generated such ill-will against Ticketmaster.”
  • ETC’s David Wertheimer was also quoted in the report: “This deal represents competition, and competition is good. It’s good for the venues, it’s good for the artists and the teams. And you know it’s just good to have choice in the marketplace.”