ScoreBig Uses Priceline’s Model to Name Your Own Price for Live Events

Let’s say you want to go see a Lakers game or a concert at the last minute. If it wasn’t sold out, you could go to the ticket booth and pay face value or check out deals on Craigslist or StubHub.

But there’s a third option emerging, where the actual teams and venues are offloading excess inventory, and instead of paying face value, customers can name their price — sort of like hotel rooms on Priceline.com.

ScoreBig.com, which launched in October 2010, is promising that winning bidders will end up getting tickets up to 60 percent off, and a minimum of 10 percent off.

“Forty percent of live event tickets go unsold nationwide,” said Peter Sinclair, the company’s VP of Marketing. “Even when they fill up the building, they are giving a lot of tickets away.”

Sinclair said this is a way for those venues or teams to move that inventory without degrading the brand. He declined to say who they work with in particular, but that the Los Angeles-based company works directly with teams in every league and ticket vendors, like TicketMob.

Today, the company is opening its site to anyone after having a long wait list. Additionally, it is launching an iPhone app called ScoreBig Daily, which offers deals on three to six of the best performances that are available that evening in your city. The free app is only availalbe for iPhone, and is only currently available in San Francisco and Los Angeles. New York will be added this summer with a national roll-out following.

Both the iPhone app and the site allow customers to name their price and choose where in the auditorium they want to sit. Plus, there are no convenience fees because all of the costs are passed on to the venue or sports team.

So far, the company has been able to maintain an inventory of roughly one million tickets at any given time on the site, and Sinclair says revenues have been growing since they started marketing. As a rough indication, Sinclair said in March they doubled the number of transactions compared to January and that April is already ahead of March.

The company has raised $20 million in two rounds from Bain Capital, U.S. Venture Partners and other individuals.

Photo Credit: Lewis Howes

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— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus