Additional Service Charges Raise the Price of Online Concert Tickets

It’s important to be able to find those must-have concert tickets. It’s an added bonus when you can find a good deal on them, too. However, each website that sells tickets to your favorite concerts has many fees they tack onto each actual ticket price. Those Madonna tickets end up being even more over-priced than they were originally.

Actually, after all the shipping fees and other charges are added, you can often pay as much as $70 on top of that really great deal, making you wonder if it was such a great deal after all.

A Little Here, a Little There

There are many different names for them. Some sites call them connection fees, some, service charges. Some sites even add on a "Building Fee," whatever that is.

Go Tickets comes out clean, but charges more for their tickets to begin with. They only charge for shipping, so you don't get all the different fees with undecipherable names. Our #1 online theater tickets site, Ticketmaster, also keeps the added fees and charges on the low end, helping you stay closer to what you originally thought you were going to pay.

We understand these sites have to make money too, but the charges keep piling up at the buyers' expense. For the most part, the charges are a percentage of the original selling price of the tickets. We have made a chart showing you what some of the fees are when you buy tickets from the Online Concert Tickets' sites at TopTenREVIEWS.

The Charges

Madonna is on her latest tour, so we figured it would be interesting to check out prices to her concert. On November 11th, she'll be performing at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colo.

The prices and surcharges of the tickets varied with each site. The cheaper the tickets, the fewer charges were tacked on; for more expensive tickets, you get more fees. We looked at the middle price range of her tickets—the same seat on every site. This is what we found:

* Service fees have different names on different sites. Some sites call it Commission, Connection fees, and Convenience charges but they all mean the same thing. We've combined it all into one name for convenience.

If you want to see more ticket prices, go to TopTenREVIEWS best Online Concert Tickets sites to get the best deals to the best events out there.