As the football season begins, Business junior Isaac Gardner and Engineering junior Zachary DeVivo launched Ticko Tickets, an app designed to efficiently buy and sell University of Michigan student tickets, on Aug. 25.
While Gardner led the business and marketing efforts, DeVivo coded and tested the app to become the best possible model.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Gardner said he created the app after struggling to get ahold of football tickets, as the demand for student season tickets often exceeds the supply.
“My freshman and sophomore year, I was not able to get season tickets, and so I tried to buy tickets from everywhere,” Gardner said. “I bought tickets from Snapchat, GroupMe, random websites, from even those guys who stand outside of games and yell, and I found that there really wasn’t an adequate way to get affordable student tickets.”
The duo launched the app for verified U-M students and ticketholders and has made ensuring security and verifying identity a top concern.
“We ensure this in two ways, mainly by limiting that everyone who signs up has a ‘umich.edu’ email, we do this through Google Workspace — and also just in the code we directly check, so those are the two ways we make sure people have (University of Michigan) credentials as they sign up,” Devivo said.
Students looking to sell tickets send their ticket to a custom email given to them through the app, where a secure database separate from Ticko creates a link containing it. Then, Ticko provides the link to a buyer after the seller accepts their offer.
Gardner and DeVivo said they hope the app will foster a safer marketplace for students, because they believe it shouldn’t be so difficult to buy and sell sporting tickets.
“Overall, the landscape with student tickets at U-M is very bad for buyers and sellers,” DeVivo said. “There’s people getting scammed on Snapchat, there’s people who literally get their identity stolen through ticket scams, and it creates a very unsafe environment to deal with as a student.”
In addition to secure ticket transfer, Gardner said Ticko allows the seller to either sell tickets traditionally by listing their price, or choose the highest bidder.
“You can instantly sell your ticket to the highest bidder, which is convenient so that if you don’t want to worry about watching the ticket prices, you can go to the ‘bid’ tab, type in a price that you are willing to pay for the game, submit it, Apple Pay puts a hold on your card, we don’t actually take the money until the seller accepts and the bid is instantly placed out,” Gardner said.
Gardner said the app is designed to be a standard marketplace with these two ways of selling: a regular buying system and a bidding system.
“It’s all instant, very real-time; there’s no waiting for tickets, there’s no coordinating between two people,” Gardner said. “And there’s no dealing with Venmo, or any sort of payment. We have Stripe, which is the industry-standard payment processor, handling all of our payments. We do not store any payment information at all, including card information.”
Gardner compared the app’s easy design to Depop, a secondhand fashion marketplace where most sellers set a price and accept buyer offers.
“I would describe us as the Depop of student tickets,” Gardner said. “We created a bid feature where you can bid to get a lower price and save money on tickets. We have seen a 20% savings on tickets for people who bid tickets, and for the ones who sell, it is instant and immediate for the sellers who don’t want to watch the market and figure out a fair price.”
In an interview with The Daily, LSA freshman Jules Heskia, a Ticko user, said the bidding feature allowed him to get tickets at lower prices, as sellers often want to get rid of the ticket as quickly as possible.
“I went into the app and bid once for a ticket for the game I wanted, and then, around five hours later, I saw that the person who was selling their ticket just accepted my bid,” Heskia said. “So basically the seller could just accept the bid whenever they want, which happened for me really quickly.”
Ticko is available on the Apple Store and the Google Play Store for free during the fall season.
Daily Staff Reporter Reese Kizy can be reached at reesekiz@umich.edu.
