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Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?

jordancolburn.com

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Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?

#11

Post by dyladan »

jordancolburn wrote: post #6
dyladan wrote: post #3

Creating a false sense of urgency is a cornerstone of modern marketing. The only difference between this and any other marketing campaign is that you just happened to catch them this time. This is just like when you go to an electronics store and they put the super expensive tv (almost) nobody buys right next to the still very expensive but comparably more modest model. You are more likely to buy that second tv even…

Yeah, but to stick with the analogy, isn't this more like putting out empty boxes of TVs that have already been sold and having employees dressed as customers frantically buying them in front of regular customers. Thanks for reading btw, and thanks to whoever posted it here.

If an electronics retailer could do this at no additional cost, I have no doubt that they would.

Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?

#12

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

Music Festivals use this same concept. By having pricing tiers for tickets you can have more "sold out" events, as they happen at each stage, driving interest.

It works, and it is REAL unlike the javascript you see here, but it is still stupid.

Can you imagine going to a Donut shop in the morning that had just sold 10% of its daily inventory and them putting up a SOLD OUT sign for Tier 1 Early Bird donuts?

I hope one day marketers find a better solution for generating interest in their products.

Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?

#14

Post by arjie »

ghostly_s wrote: post #5
klodolph wrote: post #4

The key deception with StubHub is that you're not actually buying tickets, you're actually giving away put options for free.

Huh?

Once upon a time, a guy bought tickets for a basketball game on Stubhub. Some months after he bought the ticket, superstar Kobe Bryant announced that it was going to be his last game. Ticket prices shot up and the buyer was thrilled that he still had a ticket. However, the seller was equally unenthused by the idea of having sold his ticket at so much under its now-increased value. So he cancelled the sale. There was a big fuss, and Stubhub gave the one buyer a ticket to the game.

If you give someone a put option for some quantity on something, they then get the power to sell that amount of that something to you at a specific price. Usually, you want to get money in exchange for giving someone that power. In the markets, this is called selling someone a put option.

This chap's point is that you could agree to buy a ticket for $150 to see Kobe Bryant on Stubhub. This doesn't mean you get a ticket. This just means you gave someone on Stubhub the option to sell you a ticket at $150 because if the price rises to $1500, he's going to choose not to sell you that ticket by doing what the seller did in the previous case. Since you get no money for giving the seller the power, you're not selling the option, you're giving it away for free.

That's probably the context to his comment. I neither agree nor disagree with it.

Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?

#15

Post by jordancolburn »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #12

Music Festivals use this same concept. By having pricing tiers for tickets you can have more "sold out" events, as they happen at each stage, driving interest. It works, and it is REAL unlike the javascript you see here, but it is still stupid. Can you imagine going to a Donut shop in the morning that had just sold 10% of its daily inventory and them putting up a SOLD OUT sign for Tier 1 Early Bird donuts? I hope one…

Good point. Races (5k, marathon, etc) do that also to encourage people to sign up early. I think it's dumb, but at least the festival tier thing is honest.

It's the dishonesty that kills me. The reason I think I was bugged enough to look into it is that I fell for the trick. I knew it's going to be a sold out game, so I assumed it was real traffic/user actions and almost let that influence my purchasing decisions.

Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?

#16

Post by mcescalante »

I have gone to Stubhub a few times now to try to replicate this, and searched for tickets for popular NFL and MLB teams, and I can't get this "Sold" thing to work the way this posts shows it - actually it doesn't happen at all for me. Has anyone else been able to replicate the "sold after load" behavior? Is it only on specific events?

Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?

#17

Post by jordancolburn »

bau5 wrote: post #13

If they'd used a minifier, most or all of this embarrassment could have been avoided.

I was pretty surprised, but maybe they were hoping for security by obscurity as it was buried a little in the sources. I don't think devs as a whole have really grasped a lot of the trade-offs/repercussions of moving so much logic to the client side.

Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?

#18

Post by c3534l »

dyladan wrote: post #3

Creating a false sense of urgency is a cornerstone of modern marketing. The only difference between this and any other marketing campaign is that you just happened to catch them this time. This is just like when you go to an electronics store and they put the super expensive tv (almost) nobody buys right next to the still very expensive but comparably more modest model. You are more likely to buy that second tv even…

Creating a false sense of urgency is different from creating a sense of urgency through falsehood.

Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?

#19

Post by dclowd9901 »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #12

Music Festivals use this same concept. By having pricing tiers for tickets you can have more "sold out" events, as they happen at each stage, driving interest. It works, and it is REAL unlike the javascript you see here, but it is still stupid. Can you imagine going to a Donut shop in the morning that had just sold 10% of its daily inventory and them putting up a SOLD OUT sign for Tier 1 Early Bird donuts? I hope one…

I see this as a way to let people who are _very_ interested in the event ("true fans") get in while it's cheap, taxing those who are lazier or "lesser" fans for their dawdling.

Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?

#20

Post by jordancolburn »

mcescalante wrote: post #16

I have gone to Stubhub a few times now to try to replicate this, and searched for tickets for popular NFL and MLB teams, and I can't get this "Sold" thing to work the way this posts shows it - actually it doesn't happen at all for me. Has anyone else been able to replicate the "sold after load" behavior? Is it only on specific events?

Maybe, they had some other junk about AB test flags and I didn't dig far enough to see how that was set or if it was random from the server. My wild guess is that they turn it on for popular events close to the time of the event, so there is less chance of users noticing.
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