Is StubHub employing Viagogo’s dodgy tactics already?
Months ago eBay announced that they are selling their ticket marketplace StubHub to Viagogo — a sale often described as “the worst deal in history” by the media.
It seems that finally the process of know-how exchange between the two companies began, and by “know-how” I mean dodgy e-commerce tactics that Viagogo is so famous for.
So, without further ado, let’s jump on StubHub’s Australia site.
Okay, I’m a fan of Stormzy so let’s click “Stormzy tickets”:
Two tickets left for the Adelaide show. We’re not really allowed to travel from Victoria to South Australia, but for the sake of this experiment let’s click on it anyway:
Hm, okay. This is a famous Viagogo technique — how to put some psychological pressure, ignite some FOMO in a prospective ticket buyer. Out of curiosity, I clicked View — Developer — Developer Tools in my Chrome to see what’s really going on. It caught my mind that no matter how many times I refresh this page, it takes exactly 12 seconds to “check the availability”, whatever that means.
Hmm, it seems that my browser actually loaded the list of available tickets 1 second after I opened this page and the request only took 400 milliseconds — half a second. So what happened during the remaining 11 seconds?
Luckily, all JavaScript code—all this interactive stuff on the websites like popups, animations, and so on, all of that is plain-text and can be checked in your browser any time. So I quickly located the JavaScript function responsible for this popup in one of the included JavaScript files:
Hmm. This “t” equals “12” sounds auspiciously relevant given that the word “time” starts with a “t” and this popup stays open for exactly 12 seconds. Moreover, you can see “loading_bar.explanation” and “loading_bar.title” — that’s “Please wait while we prepare…” text in the corresponding interface language.
Okay, why not — let’s make every single user wait 12 seconds for no reason, or for a reason — to stress them out, but then another interesting technique caught my attention:
If you look at the data returned for the “available tickets” request, you can see the final price of $236 right away. Users, however, won’t see this price till the last step, as if it depended on something that’s not known yet.
The second step of the process still quotes $200 and free shipping in red (shipping of electronic tickets? what?):
The final step of the check-out process finally displays $236 — a value that had been known since step 0. “Free shipping” is still here and is still in red as if it’s more important than the $36 StubHub just added:
Notice the 40–50-second countdown timer in the top right corner. It contradicts itself — it’s telling you tickets aren’t reserved but it’s showing you how much time you have left to buy the tickets, something that usually is shown when tickets are indeed reserved.
The top warning “These tickets are some of the cheapest for this category on our site” is funny too — what category? “General Admission”? Are you comparing all GA tickets in the world?
This page says that the face value was $100 — only 42% of your asking price and also it says “the seat number is unknown”. For all I know, my seat could look like this:
Prologue
It’s up to you (and maybe ACCC) do decide whether it’s acceptable or not for an e-commerce company to act like this but at least we have a clear vision of where StubHub is headed post-merger with Viagogo. Somebody needs more houses and houses aren’t gonna pay for themselves.
