But growth hacking right?
In all seriousness, I love how techniques like this are "ok" when the company is considered a "startup", but when it suddenly becomes "evil megacorp", it's all of the sudden considered deception.
Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?
21–30 of 99 posts
Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?
#22I 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.
Yeah, that's likely the case. I do not see the urgency message in my session data for this NFL game (suggesting it won't do it's sold out thing for this event) but I do see something in my local storage called "cache:local:app:urgencyMessageData"
Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?
#23Some poor programmer had to grit his teeth and implement this while pressured by his "agile" "product" "manager" to "finish the sprint".
Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?
#24If they'd used a minifier, most or all of this embarrassment could have been avoided.
WebAssembly will help hide this!
Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?
#25Creating 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…
> 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 if costs more than you initially budgeted because your brain tells you that this is the cheaper model with _almost_ the same features as the flagship tv.
I disagree that these are equivalent.
Product differentiation exists in part to ensure you leave no money on the table -- if someone is cashed up and wants to pay 50% more for an extra 2 inches on the screen size, then you let them. Conversely, for the people who are super price conscious you have the very low margin end of line product hidden at the back. You alway maximise price by ensuring you have what they want at a price they're willing to pay. Generally this is fair and works well for consumers.
But here we have prices that you _cannot_ pay. It's a dark pattern akin to bait and switch techniques that should (and might) be illegal.
Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?
#26Music 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.
I would say its probably more due to a commitment made by the fan vs maybe not going and the fact the concert/venue/promoter can invest/spend that money now instead of later.
Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?
#27Booking.com are the all-time kings of this approach. The search results page is littered with highlighted messages like.
“4 people are looking at this room now”
“2 people just booked at this hotel”
“Too bad you already missed out on this hot deal”
“X% of the neighbourhood/city/region you’re looking at is already booked!”
...
It’s quite likely real information, but the timeframes and language are vague enough to make you feel like you’ve got about 5 minutes to lock a room down. They do such a good job at instilling anxiety that you feel like you achieved something important when you finally book.
Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?
#28Just to be clear, it isn't that it's taking the top few listings and randomly marking as sold, but that the code is going out and retrieving what appear to be already sold listings (as stored in the urgencyMessageListings variable), and just injecting the top 2 from that array randomly in positions 1-5 in the main list (through a Array.splice() call).
While somewhat deceiving, it's not as bad as marking tickets that haven't sold as sold. Imagine if you were trying to sell your tix at the last minute, well that would be bad. (I've sold tix at the last minute before and that would scare me.)
Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?
#29Creating 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…
"The only difference between this and any other marketing campaign is that you just happened to catch them this time."
I'm not sure this is fair.
By displaying false information, they are point-blank lying. That's misinformation. It should be illegal - it could be.
Some other tricks such as 'creating very expensive items which they never expect to sell' as a cognitive 'price anchor' - well, not quite the same thing.
I suggest there is a distinction between falsehoods and other forms of tricks.
In the end it probably doesn't matter, but I wouldn't mind one bit if there was some consumer protections concerning this.
Re: Is StubHub's Website Deceiving Users?
#30[deleted]