SAN JOSE — With the Sharks struggling on the ice this season and failing to sell out home games for the first time since 2009, the franchise made two business moves that seemed ill-timed at best.

First, they set a March 12 deadline for season-ticket renewals — much earlier than the traditional late May or early June deadline and long before fans know if they’re investing in a playoff-caliber team.

Then they raised ticket prices, a $16 hike for seats right on the glass to $2 or $3 for most upper bowl locations. With 18 price categories, increases range from 3.7 percent for one upper bowl area to 8.2 percent for a handful of seats along the glass that don’t have club access.

This season, the cost of a season ticket ranged from $26 to $206 per game; next year it will range from $28 to $222. Ticket prices have not been announced for single-game sales, but they have been higher and varied depending on the opponent and day of the week.

The Sharks acknowledge they have heard from unhappy customers.

“We’ve had some of that, yes,” said John Tortora, the chief operating officer at Sharks Sports and Entertainment. “And we expected that type of response from some of our fans.”

But Tortora said that, overall, fans have accepted that the price increases are tied more to the costs of operating the team — energy, travel, building maintenance — than San Jose’s won-lost record. He said those costs have gone up since the last ticket price increase two years ago even though player payroll has gone down.

Moreover, he added, trade-offs that come with the earlier renewal deadline offset the downside of an earlier-than-usual financial commitment.

For example, season-ticket holders who renew by March 12 no longer must pay far in advance for first-round playoff tickets, eliminating the hassle of getting credits or refunds for games that are never played. Instead, it will be a pay-as-they-play system that means no money is tied up in advance.

In addition, that March 12 payment is 10 percent of the total cost of 2016 season tickets, not the 20 percent previously due as first payment. And fans can still get a full refund if they change their mind before the team’s annual select-a-seat event in June.

“I knew the early renewal was not going to be popular,” Tortora said. “I knew the price increase has some level of sensitivity to it. But what we were trying to do is, in essence, flip-flop your first-round playoff payment in exchange for the deposit for next year and go through the playoffs with a pay-as-you-go approach.”

The Sharks could not have known when it made the two decisions that the team would go 0-6-2 at home in February, adding to fan frustration night after night. Season-ticket holders were notified in a Jan. 13 letter of the new renewal date and learned of the price increase a few weeks later.

After every loss, did Tortora think to himself that yet another defeat was bad for business?

“No, not in so many words,” he said. “It was more a case of this is the needs of the business based upon the costs of running the operation. We always want the team to be winning when we send out price increases, but sometimes that’s not always possible.”

The decision to move the renewal date to March, Tortora said, brings the Sharks in line with 27 other NHL teams that now do the same. The previous time frame, he added, caused problems, most notably because the sales department didn’t know early enough how many seats it would need to sell for next season.

“This will allow us greater time during the latter part of the spring and offseason to sell more season-ticket packages, more SharkPaks and more individual game tickets,” Tortora said. “Last year, the window was too short.”

The Sharks could find themselves with many more seats to sell this offseason, regardless of the changes in policy and price increase. Only 17 of 33 games at the SAP Center have been announced as sellouts, though most others were only a few hundred short of the 17,562 capacity.

But nearly all games — including the sellouts — had empty seats because hundreds of tickets went unpurchased at online resale sites such as StubHub and Ticketmaster’s NHL Ticket Exchange.

Does it concern Tortora that season-ticket holders taking losses on those tickets, or ones sold at deep discount, won’t be inclined to return?

“It’s our concern as well because we want people to use their tickets,” he said. “One of the things we’re monitoring is how many people are coming to the game, how many people are using their tickets and how they’re being resold on the secondary market and at what cost.”

Moving the ticket renewal deadline to March also reinforces the declared disconnect between price increases and team performance, which, Tortora said, could work to a fan’s advantage as well.

“If we win the Stanley Cup, for example, we don’t want to feel compelled to go with a super-increase, either,” he said. “This really ties the pricing decision to the business needs irrespective of how far we go in the playoffs or whether we’re eliminated early.”

Staff writer Curtis Pashelka contributed to this report. For more on the Sharks, see David Pollak’s Working the Corners blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/sharks. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/PollakOnSharks.