Skip to main content

Chapter 3 — The Ticketing Vendors: who actually owns the seats

Attend onboarding guide · ~6 min read · ↑ Back to contents

Chapter 1 said Attend sells on top of a ticketing system. This chapter is about those systems — who they are, and a couple of quirks that matter more than you'd expect.

Primary vs secondary​

When a team puts tickets on sale for the first time, that sale happens on its primary ticketing vendor. After a fan buys, they might resell that ticket on a secondary marketplace (think StubHub). Those are two different worlds.

Attend works only in the primary market — it helps teams make their first sale in smarter ways. It deliberately stays out of resale, partly because competing with the vendors' own resale business would break Attend's contracts with them.

So whenever this guide says "the ticketing system" or "the vendor," it means the primary one.

Three vendors, four systems​

Attend connects to three primary vendors:

  • Ticketmaster — the giant; most NBA, NHL, and NFL teams.
  • Tickets.com — owned by Major League Baseball, so most MLB teams use it.
  • SeatGeek — started in resale, now winning primary teams too.

There's one wrinkle. Ticketmaster actually runs two separate systems under the hood — Host and Archtics — and Attend treats them as different. So in practice Attend integrates with four systems:

The four systems: TM Host · TM Archtics · Tickets.com · SeatGeek. You'll hear "three vendors, four systems" a lot — now you know why.

⚠️ Status note: the fully-integrated, live fan-backend systems today are TM Archtics and Tickets.com. TM Host is wired (Flex v3 / Flow v3) but not yet in production (cert cleared, contract pending — see Ch 25). SeatGeek is a vendor Attend classifies clients under but has no fan-backend integration yet (it exists only as a business-classification enum).

One team, one vendor​

A given team works with exactly one of these. For example:

  • The Golden State Warriors sell through Ticketmaster.
  • Most MLB teams use Tickets.com — though a few, like the Diamondbacks and the Yankees, are on Ticketmaster instead.
  • A team could also be classified under SeatGeek (fan-backend integration is still being established).

And here's a detail that matters later: one version of an Attend product connects to exactly one ticketing system. A team can launch several products, but each one talks to a single system.

How Attend connects (at a glance)​

You can't just sign up for these systems on a developer portal — access is a negotiated business partnership. Once that's in place, the vendor gives Attend two things:

  1. API keys — so Attend can read the team's events and available seats, and sell them.
  2. A login (OAuth) — so a fan can sign in with their ticketing-system account on Attend's site. That tells Attend the fan's account ID, which is needed to attach the purchased ticket to that fan inside the vendor's system.

Don't worry about the mechanics yet — just hold onto one idea: a sale always ends up attached to a fan's account in the vendor's system.

Recap​

  • Teams sell first-run tickets through a primary vendor; Attend works primary only — never resale.
  • Three vendors, four systems: Ticketmaster (Host + Archtics), Tickets.com, SeatGeek.
  • Each team uses one vendor, and each product version talks to one system.
  • Access is a partnership that gives Attend API keys (to read and sell) and a fan login (to get the fan's account ID).

Next → Chapter 4 — The Products: Flex, Premium, Pass, Flow