An open letter to Ticketfly, on the occasion of paying $8.75 in service charges for a $20 ticket

Dear Ticketfly,

As a music fan who has long been frustrated by Ticketmaster’s fees and service charges, I was glad to see this statement on your About page before I purchased a ticket recently:

[W]e’ve spent a lot of time examining what works in ticketing and what is downright absurd. We plan to get rid of all those hidden fees and we won’t charge you to print your ticket at home – after all it is your printer and paper!

So I have a few questions:

• Why did buying a $20 ticket to the Julian Casablancas show at DC’s 9:30 Club require paying a $4.75 Service Fee and a $4 Order Processing fee? (Total cost: $28.75. Service charges’ percentage of total cost: 30 percent.)
• Exactly what services does the $4.75 fee cover?
• Why is there an order processing fee, when I ordered via your automated online system rather than speaking to a live ticketing agent? There is no order processing fee when I buy from other websites, whether the purchase is from the site proprietor (e.g. a ticket from Southwest.com, a book from Amazon.com) or from a third party using the site as a middleman (e.g. an item from an Amazon Marketplace or Etsy seller). Why is Ticketfly different in this regard?
• Why do you include the statement about hidden fees on your About page if you charge the same kind of hidden fees as Ticketmaster does?
• Can you explain why these fees are not “downright absurd”?

Sincerely,
Josh Korr