by Brittany Kaelber

Created on: August 24, 2009

Just this past weekend I learned my lesson about buying tickets online. It came down to 4 hours before the show, no tickets, and $250 out the window. The worst part of it all was that I really wanted to go to this concert. Things ended up working out though; I'll tell you why.

My saving grace in this situation (and others) was paying through PayPal. Even though I was concerned about the $250 I had possibly been scammed out of, I knew Paypal would help me get my money back.

Rule #1 of buying tickets online: If you're going to buy tickets anywhere other than a legitimate ticket vendor, only pay through PayPal. It's free and easy to set up a PayPal account and have all of your transactions monitored, secured, and guaranteed. Paying through Paypal keeps you from having to reveal any credit card or bank information to the seller.

Rule #2 of buying tickets online: Use a site you trust. Some good sites to use for ticket purchasing are as follows: Ticketmaster.com; LiveNation.com, StubHub.com, and Ebay.com.

Ticketmaster.com is the most popular and well-known site for any and all ticket purchases. The only downside to buying your tickets through Ticketmaster is the fees that they tack onto every ticket purchase. However, your purchase is legitimate and guaranteed.

However, there are some bands, such as Rascal Flatts, who often sell tickets exclusively through other ticketing outlets. In Rascal Flatts case, that ticketing outlet is LiveNation.com. LiveNation.com's "Ticketing Guarantee" makes them a top pick for online ticket purchasing. The LiveNation "Ticketing Guarantee" promises that "tickets and ticket price are artist-approved, authentic, and 100% official," it guarantees that "your purchase and privacy are safe and secure," that "your tickets bought online are fully refundable for 3 days after you purchase them," and that they'll "refund your original online ticket purchase if you find and buy better seats on Live Nation Ticketing, up until one week before the show." That all sounds pretty good to me.

StubHub.com is another ticketing outlet much like the fore-mentioned outlets. Every order from StubHub.com also comes with a guarantee they call the "FanProtect Guarantee." This guarantee basically states that you will get your authentic tickets on-time for the event and that any cancelled event receives a refund if there is no rescheduling date.

However, there are other sites such as Ebay.com that are useful for getting you tickets

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