Set the alarm!

Concert in Dorton Arena at 2007 N.C. State Fair

Concert tickets go on sale tomorrow morning at 8 a.m., and as you know, the early bird gets the best seats! Here are some tips for a successful concert ticket purchase:

• Go to the State Fair’s web site a few minutes before 8 a.m. You can either go to the Tickets page and scroll to the bottom OR go to the Dorton Arena Nightly Entertainment page to buy tickets for a specific artist. When it gets close to 8 a.m., start refreshing your browser. You’ll see “Buy Now” buttons when it’s time to go on sale. Note: It doesn’t matter what time it is on your computer. The tickets go on sale when the eTix server says it is 8 a.m., so it may be a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later than 8, based on your computer clock. So just keep refreshing. [Update: if you refresh too often, your computer may cache the page and not actually refresh. Check your browser settings to clear the cache if you still don’t see the “Buy Now” buttons.]
• Buy concert tickets FIRST. Once you get your concert tickets, you have 15 minutes to finish your transaction. If you have time, go back and buy your admission and ride books. If you don’t have time to do more shopping, finish your transaction and come back and buy your other tickets. [Update: I’ve talked with one of the programmers at eTix and he gave me an update. The “shopping cart” feature will not be turned on in the morning, so if you want to buy multiple types of tickets, you will have to make multiple purchases. This is because of the number of people who are on the site at one time. We’ll turn the shopping cart on later in the day when traffic dies down. I’ve also been informed that there isn’t a 15-minute time limit in the first hour or two because of the traffic on the site…it may take more than 15 minutes to finish your transaction. So be patient and it will be worth the wait! As you can see in the above photo, Dorton isn’t very large. The photo was taken from the very top of Dorton with a wide-angle lens, so you can see that there really isn’t a bad seat in the house.]
• Have your credit card ready- we can only accept MasterCard & Visa. Don’t type spaces or dashes as part of your credit card number. Also, you’ll need to know your credit card’s security code, so go ahead and identify that ahead of time.
• If you aren’t happy with the seat selection, you can try to check back a little later as better seats MAY be released. This is because a seat selection is held for 15 minutes. If the seats aren’t purchased within that time frame, or if a credit card transaction is not approved, those seats will be re-released into the general pool of tickets available for purchase. WARNING: you are not guaranteed better seats if you wait because it depends on whether or not people buy tickets within the alloted time, so try this tactic at your own risk!

Good luck and happy shopping! (If you can identify the group playing on the stage in the picture, you can win some State Fair swag!)