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That's just ridiculous. Nobody reads user agreements, everybody knows nobody reads user agreements, and pretty much everybody expects that if you purchase something through a company, that company is responsible for delivering.

You can't reasonably set up a marketplace, be the middleman for buying and selling, then throw up your hands and say "sucks to be you" when the product you advertise doesn't get delivered to buyers.

This might be legal, but it is completely nuts, and the existence of a "we're completely nuts" clause in the user agreement doesn't mitigate that.

The buyer made the mistake of thinking he was dealing with StubHub rather than the seller. If he had been smart, he would have asked asked StubHub for the seller's details with the comment that he would be filing suit against either StubHub or the seller.

StubHub is a marketplace and sellers frequently sell tickets they don't own. This works out because tickets frequently drop in price shortly before the game and, for the times that they don't, sellers usually eat the loss. But this seller decided not to deliver and, for that, they should be sued. The equivalent in the stock market would be to short a stock and then not pay up when the stock quadrupled. Given that the value of the loss suffered by the buyer is roughly $5k ($6k tickets less ~$k credit at StubHub), it's a good candidate for small claims court.

Exactly - he should have demanded the seller's contact details so he could file a lawsuit. Per the Stubhub's TOS: "When placing an order, you are entering into a binding contract with the Seller to purchase those tickets...When a Buyer accepts your offer by purchasing your ticket through our Site or Services, you are contractually bound to deliver that exact ticket for the specified price and within the required delivery timeframe."

Given the way Stubhub handled the situation, you could probably include StubHub on a count of tortious interference with a contract. (They proactively cancelled the order.) That would get their attention.

Based on the customer service emails it looks like StubHub knew full well what was going on and aided the seller in pulling out of the agreement.

Of course they knew what was going on. A seller "made a mistake" in listing the tickets, thus the tickets didn't actually exist in StubHub's eyes and they were forced to cancel the transaction.

It is impossible to know if the seller is telling the truth in this situation or not. Everybody makes mistakes, this seller just claims to have made a more costly one than usual.

StubHub is a marketplace, they can't investigate every time somebody claims to have made a mistake in listing their tickets.

IF the seller re-listed the exact same seats for a higher price once the original order was cancelled, I could see how StubHub could easily call out the fraudster and ban them from using their site... but even then the seller could just sign up using another credit card and a friend's address.

>It is impossible to know if the seller is telling the truth in this situation or not. Everybody makes mistakes

When the reason given for the 'mistake' is obviously false, it's not impossible.

>they can't investigate every time somebody claims to have made a mistake in listing their tickets

They certainly can investigate every case of purchases in the $900+ range. You know, as part of their multiple hundreds of dollars in fees.

>When the reason given for the 'mistake' is obviously false, it's not impossible.

The problem is that you could not concretely determine that to be the case. Thousands if not millions of ticket sales are canceled for a variety of reasons on StubHub every single day.

They would be going broke trying to investigate all of them for fraud, not to mention open themselves up to potential lawsuits by the alleged perpetrators they wrongly defamed if they made a mistake.

The article says that stubhub charges a 20% fee when the seller cancels. So again, they absolutely are able to investigate every such situation while making a profit. Every ticket? No. Cases where they're making over a hundred dollars? Yes.

Sellers are a much smaller group and more in demand commodity than buyers. I would venture a guess that sites like Stubhub will generally favor the seller over the buyer in any dispute. That is the basis of this policy and exactly what happened in this instance.

I'm not sure if StubHub could force somebody to sell tickets they no longer want to sell if they wanted to.

The tickets were already sold. What would be forced here would be delivery of what was sold.

They can't exactly force that either, but they should be able to force penalties or restitution if they fail to perform.

I've never used StubHub. When you buy tickets, does a seller profile appear next to the listing, as in Amazon? If so, a cheap move by this seller should at least put a bad mark on the seller's public profile. That could benefit reputable sellers, though. Of course, anyone selling their first tickets on StubHub would be at a disadvantage because they'd have no reputation.

  does a seller profile appear next to the listing

No. Sellers can't even provide details on their tickets besides the few checkbox yes/no options.

Not sure you can hold a marketplace to the same standards of a company delivering its own product.

I don't need to reed any user agreement to know that. And Stubhub is clearly a marketplace. I would assume this site is just the same as eBay or Airbnb. I know that are some responsibilities of a marketplace, but I also know that I'm ultimately trusting the other transaction part (not the marketplace).

If I think this risk is too high, I don't use a marketplace (personally, I never bought anything through eBay or equivalents myself precisely because of this).

eBay takes complete responsibility for the transactions that they facilitate. eBay guarantees that your item will ship and be delivered within a certain time and will be as described. The seller can still mess with you, but the timeframe is limited and eBay will handle the dispute. AirBnB is more of a "sucks to be you" style when it comes to canceled reservations, which is pretty weak.

At the end of the day, the most eBay will do is make sure you get your money back if the seller doesn't deliver. That's exactly what StubHub did, AND they offered him hundreds in gift certificates as well.

The problem here is that getting one's money back doesn't feel like enough, because you're losing out on massive appreciation of the purchase between when you bought it and now.

This is one of the most difficult customer service issues to solve, because the cost to correct the situation in the customer's eyes has no upper bound.

With eBay the seller also has to deliver in a timely fashion. You're right, if they fail then the best that happens is you get your money back, but you find out reasonably quickly whether or not they're going to perform, and there's never any confusion about whether or not the transaction has completed.

So a big part of this problem is that StubHub is letting sellers cheat buyers out of massive appreciation by not giving them a reasonably deadline for delivery, nor penalizing the sellers for failing to perform.

The potential costs to correct the situation don't have to be an issue, because StubHub could conceivably push those costs onto the seller trying (and in this case apparently succeeding!) to cheat the system. They could write their seller contract to state that the seller is responsible for all costs borne by StubHub acquiring replacement tickets, and that would remove their incentive to pull stunts like this.

As others have mentioned, in many cases the seller doesn't physically have the tickets at the time of sale, and might only get them a few days before the game. Ticketmaster cooperates with venues to do this to -- dum dum dum -- avoid ticket resale. That's the problem.

If they're going to support such tickets then they need some big "seriously, deliver what you sold" penalties for bad sellers.

This would be fine if they weren't advertising a "Fan Protect Guarantee." They are offering additional safe guards or at least the appearance of them to encourage buyers to take on that risk. It is extremely shady when they then don't follow through.

They technically did follow through. Their guarantee is to provide comparable tickets or a refund. Comparable tickets were not available (because their idea of "comparable" includes "at the same price," ha ha ha) and they provided a refund.

They did not follow through on actually protecting the fans, just restoring the original money. They are presenting the appearance that they will ensure the purchase, while the terms actually promise no such thing.

Yeah, the "Fan Protect Guarantee" is more like "Fan Protect Guarantee Unless The Price Goes Up A Lot."

This.

The old Stubhub (pre-eBay) made a BIG deal of denied-at-door situations, and local managers had broad discretion to source replacement tickets, even at higher cost.

Nowadays, they realize that doing so is not profitable in the short term.

What? A company oversold its guarantee by using creative definitions?

Next thing you know, people are going to start offering a lifetime guarantee that's only good for the lifetime of the product! ;)

Hence my 1st takeaway:

"StubHub should be more transparent about the seller-side risks involved when "selling tickets" to customers"

My whole point is that no matter how transparent the "sucks to be you" clause is, it's still a terrible way to run things and they should stop disclaiming responsibility.

They also have the following policy for sellers:

"If your tickets have sold but you cannot fulfill the order (also referred to as 'dropping a sale' or a 'dropped sale'), StubHub may charge your payment method an amount equal to 20% of the price of the ticket sold to compensate us for the losses we incur to meet our obligations under the FanProtectTM Guarantee. In some cases involving dropped sales that result in unusually large losses to StubHub (for example, dropped sales involving large numbers of tickets or tickets with significant price appreciation), however, StubHub reserves the right in its sole discretion to charge your payment method the full amount of the replacement costs StubHub incurs under the FanProtectTM Guarantee (including costs in excess of 20% of the ticket price)."

They have given themselves the ability to make this right and go after the seller for the costs of it, but they are choosing not to, screwing the buyer instead. They will of course happily pocket this 20% fee and the additional higher fees on the eventual sale of the tickets at the higher price, whether on this account or another (if the seller is banned).

"2. Buyers should be more aware of the fact that Stubhub is only a marketplace, and they are really at the mercy of the seller."

Why should buyers be aware of this when Stubhub advertises a "FanProtectTM Guarantee"?! Stubhub shouldn't be advertising one thing on nearly every page of their website and then disclaiming in their TOS.

Also, Stubhub has come out to say that they'll get this guy to the game. No mention of changing policy to make sure it doesn't happen again though.

https://twitter.com/StubHub/status/684906796813697024?

  They have given themselves the ability to make this right
  and go after the seller for the costs of it, but they are
  choosing not to, screwing the buyer instead.

You're right in general, but just to nitpick: If there are only 100 real tickets to an event, and 110 tickets have been promised by StubHub, 10 customers will go without tickets regardless of StubHub's willingness to pay the market rate for extra tickets.

In practice this is not how markets work. More tickets become available, even if just arb from earlier buyers, as the price increases. And regardless it's not what happened here.

If you read the fine print on the Seller's TOC regarding a "dropped sale" the only reason that such a situation is permitted is because the seller "cannot" furnish the tickets.

In my reasoning, being unwilling (i.e. "will not") to fulfill a transaction is entirely different than being unable to fulfill a transaction (i.e. "can not") and I'd hope that pounding StubHub and the seller would be a really easy avenue for a skilled lawyer. If this has happened before, and for large sums of money, I'd be curious if there's enough people interested to make it a class action.

Remember, if you can buy through the venue, buy through the venue.