Dear Ticketmaster…

Please find my (IMHO quite constructive) complaint about your website below. I tried to submit this complaint via the TicketMaster page, but after a punishing process of finding the feedback form and entering this feedback, your submission button sent me with an automated response that, after listing a lot of possible solutions to my problem (none of which helped), finally left me with the somewhat hidden information that

*** YOUR INCIDENT HAS NOT YET BEEN SUBMITTED, PLEASE CLICK “FINISH SUBMITTING QUESTION” AFTER READING THE INFORMATION BELOW ***

Guess what? There was no link to submit the incident! Just a bunch of links to additional FAQ entries that didn’t help, either.

I tried to call you to log my complaint with a human being, but your customer service was out for the day and once again, I was left with an automated message. I tried to be constructive about this, but you went out of your way to appear as a huge corporate entity with no personality. So guess what, TicketMaster: FUCK YOU. I’ll unsubscribe from your ticket newsletter and not use your service again – which will be difficult, since you pretty much have a monopoly on the market.

Anyway, the feedback I tried to semd to you, dear TicketMaster, is this:

I just reached the breaking point trying to use your webpage and didn’t buy any tickets because of it. The security check has become ridiculous. I understand that Ticketmaster needs to protect itself against bots that try to automatically buy tickets for hot events. But the current scheme (provided by Recaptcha) has become unintelligible and too hard to use. I’ve searched for tickets on several occasions, and the security picture that was provided always was impossible to read. I don’t think I cleared that test on the first try fo the last three times. Try as hard as I might, I could not decypher those words.

Trying to find a “Contact Us” link was too difficult, as well. This form is not linked from the main page (I did a search for the word “Contact” and nothing came up), and once I found this form linked from the Help section I couldn’t find a single reply category that lets me provide feedback on webpage usability. So I’m using the “General Feedback -> Received Error During Purchase Process” category instead.

I’m sorry to say that using the Ticketmaster webpage has become such a hassle that I will not use it to buy tickets until the user experience has been improved. I’m not the type to complain about this kind of stuff (I’ve been using e-commerce since its early days). But this has become so annoying that I felt compelled to let you know.