Can anyone please explain how this works?
VIP tickets were 1st 10 rows and now changed to mid tiers, etc, so how is this website selling floor seats when VIP tickets may not even be floor seats? See link attached. They have a huge choice of floor seats!!

http://www.viagogo.co.uk/...gGroupID=2

its like stub hub
[Edited 6/17/07 14:59pm]

lydiatrim said:

Don't know this site but it sounds like they are touts/scalpers.

tonia said:

Viagogo:hmm2:

Link:http://www.realbusiness.c.../1780.aspx
Back of an envelop: Viagogo
By: Rebecca Burn-Callander

An internet auction site? Very eBay... But Viagogo is for tickets only. By Rebecca Burn-Callander.

For the poor sap who lost out in the frenzied battle for Take That reunion concert tickets, touts were a necessary evil.


These are the unsavoury characters who accost you on rainy street corners and charge you huge sums for tickets, which may or may not be valid. The process is a bit like consensual mugging –and it’s illegal.

Eric Baker has led an ongoing crusade against these sociopaths. He co-founded US-based secondary ticketing site Stubhub, which generated more than $400m in ticket sales last year, and recently sold to eBay for $310m.

Now he is hoping that his latest venture, the London-based Viagogo, will replicate this success. The Viagogo website launched in August 2006 and provides a portal for ticket-holders to sell their unwanted tickets.

The sales categories include sports, concerts and theatre. Tickets are sold at a “fixed price”, “declining price” – when Viagogo reduces the cost of the tickets daily until a minimum specified by the user – or the eBay-style “auction” and “purchase now” features.

Baker believes he has tapped into a new market, appealing to those ticket-holders who might usually let their tickets go to waste rather than stand out in the cold hawking their goods. Buyers, too, get a better deal: they can browse for the best price.

Before you take the plunge and log on, however, here’s a caveat. The company generates revenue by taking a share of the payment – from both parties. Viagogo charges a fee of ten per cent of the value of the sale to the buyer and 15 per cent to the seller.

The buyer also typically pays postage. Baker argues that the company merits its 25 per cent fee because it provides trackable delivery and manages the whole sale process, so that buyer and seller never have to communicate with one another.

But paying a total £25 on a £100 transaction is pretty painful, and there’s nothing to really deter people from pushing prices sky-high on sold-out events. Which would do wonders for Viagogo’s bottom line.

But Viagogo also provides a guarantee. If the seller loses the tickets, or forgets to post them whatever the scenario Viagogo will compensate the buyer with similar or better tickets and charge the cost to the seller’s credit card.

If you pay to see a show on Viagogo, come hell or high water, you’ll see the show.
Viagogo has a couple of other tricks up its sleeve. It struck a deal with STV, Scotland’s ITV franchise, to bring traffic to the site.

And it has achieved the ultimate accolade in this business: deals with Manchester United and Chelsea. The football clubs made Viagogo their official secondary ticketing site, the first endorsement of its kind in the UK.

Viagogo’s agreement states that tickets can only be sold to One United and True Blue club members, to honour anti-hooligan laws. So the website is the only legal option for season ticket holders wishing to sell, and fans wanting to buy.

In return, Viagogo pays the clubs annual fees in the millions. Luckily the start-up’s got cash to spare, having raised $20m over two rounds led by VC fi rm Index Ventures. And there are perks to having the clubs’ blessing – with signs at the stadiums, ads on tickets and links online, fans are constantly directed to the Viagogo site.

Several other football partnerships are planned. Baker hopes that football fans will give Viagogo the advantage over eBay. As will the buyers’ guarantee: “Tickets are time sensitive. On eBay, if you buy a table and it’s not right, you can just return it and buy another.

But with a one-night only Madonna concert, or a football match, once the ticket expires it’s useless.” Is competition from primary ticketing companies like Ticketmaster an issue? Baker laughs.

“If Ticketmaster says to a customer, ‘It’s sold out, but we can sell you a secondary ticket for £10 more’, the customer is going to feel ripped off. It’s a confl ict of interest. Ticketmaster tried it in the US when it saw Stubhub making money, but it didn’t last long.”

Baker isn’t stopping with the UK. He aims to roll out the site into Germany over the next 18 months, and eventually cover the whole of Europe. The European secondary ticketing market is currently worth £4bn to £5bn per year, with the UK accounting for 20 per cent.

And Baker has assembled a formidable advisory board, including lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman, Yahoo!’s David Katz, and eBay Germany founders the Samwer brothers, to help conquer this booming sector.

He’s also introduced bank transfer payment methods, “because in Germany, they’re not big on credit cards”. But Viagogo is going to have to use every weapon in its arsenal.

With eBay-owned Stubhub hot on his trail for the lucrative European market, Baker is set to see some stiff competition over the coming year.
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Auction sites bite back on touts
By Caroline Briggs
Entertainment reporter, BBC News
Thursday, 19 April 2007
Link:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/h...523563.stm
Internet auction sites have been criticised by concert promoters, who view them as enemy number one in the fight against ticket touts. Here two such sites - eBay and viagogo - defend their position.

The scene is familiar to music lovers up and down the land.

You hammer the telephone, open numerous windows on the internet, but you still fail to get your hands on a ticket for your favourite band.

Within minutes the concert is sold out and your dreams of rocking with The Police or reliving your teenage years with Take That are shattered.

Or are they?

Within seconds, internet auction sites are awash with tickets selling for two, three, four times what they were a few minutes earlier.

It is tempting, and many succumb to buying from that secondary market.

Promoters estimate up to a third of tickets are resold.

And it is a situation the music industry fears will get worse, laying the blame firmly at the feet of so-called "bedroom ticket touts" and the internet auction sites they sell them on.

It is an accusation the sites feel is unjustified.

Gladiators

"Consumers actually like having the option of going to the secondary market," says Eric Baker, chief executive of "ticket exchange" website Viagogo.

On Viagogo, the seller sets the price or can auction the ticket. Viagogo guarantees the seller is paid, and if the buyer's tickets do not arrive or are fraudulent, it will find replacements on the secondary market.

Viagogo charges the seller 15% commission and the buyer 10% for the pleasure.

Mr Baker, whose previous - and similar - company Stubhub sold more than $400m worth of tickets in 2006, rejects suggestions that his site gives sellers a legitimate platform on which to peddle their tickets.

"People have resold tickets since the days of the gladiators," he says.

"They were probably very enterprising teenagers, asking if people wanted to pay more to sit next to Ceasar, or whatever.

"The reselling of tickets is not going to go away, so the question is how do you make it a better situation for the world that we live in today, and I believe this is it."

'Perfect market'

EBay, the biggest internet auction site, holds a similar view.
"We come at this from the standpoint that tickets are personal property," explains eBay corporate reputation manager Vanessa Canzini.

"Like a book or CD, people are free to resell them if they want to for as much as the market will bear.

"We have been called the 'perfect market'. Supply meets demand and people pay what they think something is worth."

EBay disputes that large-scale ticket touting takes place on its site, citing research by ICM last year that showed nine out of 10 eBay sellers who had listed tickets in the previous 12 months had listed less than five.

"What we do see is people who resell their ticket because they can longer go, or, if we are being honest, will sell two tickets then buy another two to make a profit on them, but it is very, very small scale."

Ms Canzini says it is up to the music industry to tackle touts if they feel it is a growing problem.

"We feel promoters and organisers put the tickets in the hands of touts in the first place.

"They sell them to people in bulk, or have phonelines and websites crashing because of a stampede, then they expect us to police the mess that they create in doing so.

"The way the primary market stands, the odds of getting a ticket is stacked against the real genuine music fan. Most people don't have time to sit on the internet all day trying.
Recently some promoters have tried to beat eBay at their own game, by auctioning the best seats at some concerts, and undermining the secondary market.

'Official' auctions

The Police, Beyonce, Genesis and Justin Timberlake were done in this way, with bids for Timberlake starting at £265 on one official site.

It is a new technique that makes eBay bristle.

"They will auction off up to ten rows of a concert at a time. The higher the bid, the better the seat location. We don't think that is particularly transparent," says Ms Canzini.

As a result of "summits" the government has held with the music industry and auction sites, eBay decided to make sellers disclose the face value of their tickets, but concert promoters want eBay to go one step further.

They want eBay to make sellers print the serial numbers of the tickets they are selling to prove they have them.

But eBay is reluctant to enforce this, as promoters could then void the tickets under the terms and conditions of the original sale.

This, Ms Canzini says, would hit music fans and penalise the genuine sellers.

"I can't go to a concert, I list my ticket, you buy it, you go along on the night - a genuine fan - you are devastated to be told that the tickets are voided. That's not acceptable."

"Let's not forget that the secondary ticket market was around long before eBay came on the scene, and it will be around whether eBay is there or not."

Sounds safer purchasing from Viagogo than Ebay

Terms and Conditions
Link: http://www.viagogo.co.uk/...groupid=97
2.12 Ticket Fulfillment. Once the Seller lists tickets for sale and a Buyer purchases or bids on the tickets, the Seller is responsible for completing the transaction with the exact tickets the Seller listed. The Seller will be charged a replacement fee if the Seller lists tickets for sale and confirms the transaction, or lists tickets in an auction format, and those exact tickets are not available. The replacement fee will depend on the market price and how much it costs Us to purchase comparable or better replacement tickets for the Buyer. We will make reasonable endeavours to provide comparable or better replacement tickets for the Buyer.