Viagogo are open and touting for your business.

Viagogo is an online ticket exchange that allows people to buy and sell live event tickets in a safe and guaranteed way.

Viagogo’s mission is to bring efficiency and transparency to what has traditionally been a murky market place, thus allowing consumers to buy and sell tickets in a safe and guaranteed way. Viagogo, the UK’s first legal secondary ticket website for football tickets, opened for business only a few weeks ago. “With over $20 million funding in hand [from Index Ventures], Viagogo is launching into Europe’s ticket-reselling market as the first to offer consumers legal access to secondary football ticketing”, said CEO Eric Baker, “Viagogo will move its American formula into the budding U.K. and German marketplaces”.

So how does Viagogo work? If there’s a ticket on sale for £100. The buyer will pay £110 to purchase the ticket, factoring in a 10 percent commission to Viagogo. The seller receives £85, thanks to a 15 percent commission on the other end. But Viagogo doesn’t just sit back and collect its profit; the company actually takes care of the shipping labels itself, tracks the package, and holds the entirety of the payment until the deal goes through.  

“There really is no service like Viagogo that exists–that is a safe, secure place where you are guaranteed to get the price that you want and that it will be delivered on time for your event,” said Danny Rimer, a general partner at Index Ventures who joins Viagogo’s board as part of the deal.

Of all the companies I have looked at in the last few months, Viagogo screams success. The idea and business model fill a market need.  The management team appears very experienced. The money is in the bank to make this company grow rapidly. The advisory board reads like the who’s who of the UK’s web 1.0 success stories, with Brent Hoberman Founder and former Chairman of lastminute.com, Dr. Simon Murdoch Former VP Europe of Amazon.com and of course Danny Rimer General Partner of Index Ventures, he being the investor behind deals such as Video Island, Skype and most recently FON.

And finally they already have signed exclusive supplier deals with Chelsea and Manchester United, although I personally won’t be buying my tickets just yet until they sign up Liverpool FC.  ;-)

It will be interesting to see what happens on the search engine sites that often have adverts to buy tickets for football matches. Will they remain or not? In fact I used one of these sites recently to get my tickets to Chelsea v Liverpool.  I hope they turn up? I suppose with Viagogo I would haven’t to hope.  All I would have to hope for is can we beat Chelsea!