The market is buzzing with digital startups ‘disrupting’ the status quo across a vast range of business sectors. The world of ticket sales, whether for sporting or music events, is no different.
Our blog followers may already have come across LA based, Scorebig, which aims to solve the problem of unsold event tickets. In that case the tickets come from the venues, teams and promoters directly and you name your price! If your offer is accepted, you get the tickets.
In the UK the press recently reported that Ebay was bringing Stubhub, its secondary ticket sales website over this year. Rivals will include Viagogo and Seatwave (run by Joel Cohen).
Exciting startup Ticket Tailor, based in Scrutton Street (SiliconRoundabout) offers a platform for event organisers to sell tickets direct to their customers. It cuts out ticket agencies, therefore saving booking/convenience fees!
Whilst typically a booking fee might be 10% of face value, Ticket Tailor give the promoters freedom to set their own booking fee by simply charging a monthly fee based upon the number of events they have on sale. If they still want to charge a booking fee they can but not many like paying them and until now it was outside the promotors control. Not any more!
100% customisable, the platform allows users to sell tickets online and can be integrated into their own facebook page. A widget can be provided for a website and smartphone versions for ticket purchases ‘on the move’ are provided. Payments are taken via PayPal and etickets are dispatched by email and SMS. So far so good, but we have a question for founder Jonny White;
Do you feel that the digital space for ticket sales might already be crowded (Eventbrite, Ticketweb, Ticketmaster..) and could consolidation be around the corner due to the rapid speed of change? After all, who would have thought that Digital music would have accounted for 30% of all UK album sales in the third quarter of 2011 up from 20% last year!
The ticketing space is definitely crowded but with many me-too products. We are approaching the problem with a fresh perspective. Rather than trying to wedge ourselves in the middle of sellers and buyers we are simply a SaaS platform for the sellers with a monthly fee. Creating an e-ticket is not a cost point and we don’t see why ticketing companies feel the need to take a share of event sales.
E-ticketing has been slow to evolve and benefit from the cost savings that the web brings compared to other industries and we should expect to see many more waves of innovation in ticketing especially with recent hardware developments.
One things for certain and that’s that people won’t be happy paying booking fees forever.
To find out more about Ticket Tailor visit their website at http://www.tickettailor.com
Alternatively, to find out more about available office property in the Silicon Roundabout area contact Kushner at www.kushnerproperty.com
